LAHORE: Punjab University Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Mujahid Kamran has said conspiracies are being hatched to dismember Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Addressing the Punjab University’s 123rd convocation here on Saturday, he said Muslims were so much ignorant that they even could not count their dead and this work was done by Australian Jewish scientist Gideon Polya.

In his book “Body Count” Gideon Polya had revealed that there had been 1.3 billion avoidable deaths during the period 1950-2005 of which 600 million were Muslims.

Prof Kamran said the Afghan nation had the passion to fight and was an asset for the Muslims. He said in recent Afghan War, around 4.9 million Afghans had been killed out of which 1.2 million were killed in bombings and 3.7 million Afghans died of diseases and lack of medicines till 2010.

He said 2.7 million Iraqis were killed in the recent Iraq War and five million children had become orphan. He said both the wars were imposed on the basis of ‘false pretext’.

He said: “Our journalists and columnists should focus on these issues and highlight these problems as well.”

The VC said the successive governments in the past did not pay appropriate attention to education. He said prioritising education was a matter of understanding for both the leadership and the people. He said the United States had the GDP of $17 trillion and was spending from $850 billion to $1,000 billion on education while it was spending from $340 billion to $510 billion on research and development.

“On the other hand, Pakistan’s total GDP is around $250 billion and it is spending around 0.2 per cent of it on R&D and less than two per cent on education,” he added.

The VC advised the students to seek allocations for education and health as per international standards from politicians when they come to them for vote.

Some 100 PhD, 618 MPhil/MS, 289 post-graduation, 156 under-graduation degrees and 173 medals were distributed among the students.

As many as 81 medals were distributed among undergraduate students while 92 medals were awarded to Masters’ students. A total of 1,336 degrees, medals and prizes were distributed in the convocation.

Published in Dawn, October 11th , 2015

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