In the last two weeks,  there are quite a few articles in the news papers disclosing discriminatory practices against Asian Americans for admission into Ivy League Colleges. David Brooks of NYT writes:

“At the start of the 1980s, about 5 percent of Harvard students were Asian-American. But the number of qualified Asian-American applicants rose so that by 1993 roughly 20 percent of Harvard students had Asian heritage.

But, according to Ron Unz, a funny thing then happened. The number of qualified Asian-Americans continued to rise, but the number of Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard fell so that the student body was about 16 percent Asian. Between 1995 and 2011, Harvard’s Asian-American population has varied by less than a percentage point around that 16.5 percent average. Not only that, the percentage of Asian-Americans at other Ivy League schools has also settled at a remarkably stable 16 percent, year after year.

This smells like a quota system, or at least that was the implication left by Unz’s searing, sprawling, frustrating and highly debatable piece, “The Myth of the American Meritocracy,” in The American Conservative. It wins the first of the 2012 Sidney Awards, which go to the best magazine essays of the year.

You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. The fanatical generations of immigrant strivers have been replaced by a more comfortable generation of preprofessionals, he implies.”

Unz writes in his article “The Myth of The American Meritocracy”

Comparing Jews with Asians

In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.⁵¹ The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.

This overrepresentation of Jews is really quite extraordinary, since the group currently constitutes just 2.1 percent of the general population and about 1.8 percent of college-age Americans.⁵² Thus, although Asian-American high school graduates each year outnumber their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one, American Jews are far more numerous at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated within a few states, so the “diversity” factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better at the admissions office.

Click on the liink to read full report ” The Myth of The American Meritocracy”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

Posted by F. Sheikh

Shared by Tahir Mahmood

In this interesting article the author writes that the resilient people of Pakistan are keeping the country together and stepping up, despite the failure of the Government, whenever the the country needs them.The author writes in concluding paragraph;( F.Sheikh)

“The question, in the years ahead, is whether Pakistan’s resilient society can beat back the cresting waves of militancy and sectarianism that threaten to tear Pakistan apart and, one day, even plunge it into civil war. Balkanisation, more so than an Islamist takeover, is a very real threat to the Pakistani state.

Up to now, the Pakistani society has stepped in to provide services and fill roles where the government is absent. Yet this isn’t a sustainable strategy. To avert disaster in the decades ahead, the Pakistani state will need to step up — and provide the leadership and good judgment long exemplified by its society.” Click link to read full article.

http://dawn.com/2012/12/21/why-pakistan-is-not-a-failed-state/

Shared by Shoeb Amin.

Strength is not in the numbers, only 0.2% are responsible for a large proportion of the world ‘s discoveries and contributions to every sphere of knowledge.(F.Sheikh)

The article in The Pew Forum.

“Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.” To read Full Article click link below;

http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape-exec.aspx

Shared by Tahir Mahmood

It is a great article and raises serious questions not just for people back home in Pakistan, but also for all the Muslims living in the West. It is like elephant in the room and no one wants to talk about it. In the West, every few months we hear news of some young Muslim apprehended for planning a terrorist act. We mostly dismiss such news as entrapment by law enforcement agency, act of some misguided disturbed individual or come up with some lame conspiratorial excuse. Are we, the Muslims in the West, shrugging off our responsibility to look deeply into this problem and find out why these young individual are prone to such entrapment in the first place? Should not we be having this discussion in the Islamic Centers as well as on dinner tables to prevent these horrible acts that are poisoning the future of our young generation?   Even one such incidence is too many, and every one of us-every one of us -suffers the consequences and pays the price for such acts. Such acts do not advance any cause and hurt Muslims more than anyone else.( F. Sheikh )

The author writes about situation in Pakistan;

“This is not to suggest that average Pakistanis actively embrace or advocate violent extremism. However, average Pakistanis do often relate to, justify, and refuse to unconditionally condemn the ideologies driving violent extremism – even when it directly impacts their lives in the form of suicide bombings or militant attacks. This accommodation of the extremist mindset creates political space and a favourable environment for radical groups to thrive in.”

Click link below to read full article;

http://dawn.com/2012/12/17/extremism-and-mainstream-pakistan/