Ralf Goergens

The future doesn’t belong to Islam, thank you very much

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Mark Steyn is, as so often in the last years, claiming yet again that the future belongs to Islam.

Point is, demographics aren’t quite as decisive as they used to be, and large, uneducted masses are mostly a danger to themselves nowadays. Not to mention the fact that there only are 15 million Muslims in all of Europe and that their birthrates also aren’t all that high in several countries. German Muslims have a birthrate below replacement level, at about 1.8 babies per woman, and it is rapidly declining even further. The danger of substantial Muslim immigration also is very slim. Our expulsion policies towards Third World immigrants already are inhumane in their draconian harshness, and they are only going to get harsher over time. ‘Our’ Muslims also aren’t a monolithic mass. Especially in Germany we have a lot of Alevites, whom ‘mainstream’ Muslims consider heretics. There is no way that the Alevites make common cause with the more conventional Muslims whom they in return see as a threat to themselves.

As to age structure: The relative proportion of young people is higher than in the ‘native’ populations, but in absolute terms the ‘native’ still have hands down more young people of fighting age, as well as the weapons and all the other stuff that is needed to keep the barbarians at bay. And we will do that, and more, once we feel seriously threatened. Most Europeans so far simply don’t, and there is no concrete danger you could point to, except in some French and Belgian cities. And the Muslim ‘youths’ wouldn’t last more than 10 minutes if they ever tried that crap on French farmers, rather than the urban types, so those specific problems will stay localized.

Mark Steyn is a smart fellow, but when he goes on and on about demographics he is reminding me of the statisticians who claimed in the 1850s that by 1910 the streets of New York would be covered with four feet of horse manure. They couldn’t have foreseen the motorcar. Steyn’s arguments aren’t quite like that, more like that of one of those statisticians who’d refuse to change his opinion even after the invention of the motorcar. He simply isn’t thinking outside of the box. Demographics isn’t what it used to be, the more populous country or ethic group doesn’t win automatically anymore, not for decades in fact. Such a large population would have to invest a lot of time and money into the education and training of its young, and as it happens Islam does exactly the opposite. If there ever are serious conflicts betwen ‘native’ Europeans and Muslim immigrants, the Muslims won’t have a chance.

A wide-spread but brief blackout

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Glenn Reynolds and David Kaspar are making much of the European blackout from last weekend.

Too much, really. Yes, 10 million people were affected, but depending on the specific area power came back on in 30 minutes to a couple of hours. If I hadn’t learned about it from TV, I would never have known that there was an outage at all. It was a different story when I was in Italy in 2003 and half the country lost power for quite some time. It was hard to miss that.

There is an investigation on the causes of this latest blackout, so far nobody is sure what did it. It looks as if those areas that did have large power stations of their own were spared, while a lot of those that only have power lines running through them had blackouts. Maybe we need to decentralize power generation to help avoid outages in the future.

Either way, more nuclear power won’t do the trick alone. This July was even hotter than the extremly hot July of 2003, some large rivers carried so little water that a number of nuclear power plants almost had to be shut down, due to a lack of cooling water. So decentralisation looks like the way to go, especially since there have been some reports that Islamists are thinking about hitting European and American power lines. Easy targets, and a lot of damage with relatively little effort.

You can’t ‘manage’ trade without huge costs

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A while back Richard North posted this at EU Referendum :

Is there anything the EU has ever done that can be considered, unambiguously, an unalloyed success?

Well, if you are to believe the hype, one such is the Asia-Europe Meeting, or ASEM to its friends, a “cooperation forum” for Asian and European countries. It was initiated in 1996 “to strengthen dialogue and interaction between the two regions” and to promote “concrete cooperation that aims at sustainable economic and social development”.

Yet, via chron.com [the link doesn’t work anymore, the article can be found here, though] Associated Press writer Robert Weilaard puts a different spin on it. Normally, AP is the most Europhile of all the press agencies, but Weillaard is definitely not of the Kathy Gannon mould.

Heading his piece, “Unhappy Birthday for EU-Asia Relations”, he tells us that at a summit in Bangkok in 1996, European and Asian leaders pledged to boost economic, trade and political relations to offset America’s disproportionate weight in global affairs. Today, he adds, both sides agree that has failed miserably.

As so often, I disagree with Richard as to the merits or lack of same of the European Union, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Either way, attempts to manage trade politically always fail. I replied in the comment thread to the post in the EU Referendum forum, just arguing on general priciples, without going into the details too much:

It failed because the whole idea is wrong-headed, both in concept and in the idea “America’s disproportionate weight in global affairs” is a bad thing (I’m adding that last bit just for completeness’ sake, for it goes without saying).

We talk about “global trade” all the time, but the importance of trading partners increases more or less exponentially the closer they are to your own country. Since Asia is so far away from Europe, other trading partners take precedence, meaning that European countries necessarily trade mostly with each other as well as the United States (oil imports from Arab countries aside).

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Blogger facing deportation to Pakistan

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Via Captain’s Quarters:

Issac Schr�dinger of the Liberty and Justice Blog currently is fighting deportation from Canada to his native country of Pakistan.

His coblogger Michael van der Galien writes that

As all of you who have read (some of) his articles will know, Isaac is very critical about radical Islam. He witnessed the results of a culture of radical Islam, he saw the effects of this ideology of hatred and ignorance, how people are forced to live, first-hand. As a result, he understands that Muslim extremists do not just pose a threat to the West, but also to every single person living in ‘Muslim countries’.

As a result, it should be obvious to anyone with any basic knowledge about this subject, it is not exactly safe for him, an apostate, to live in a country in which Muslim extremists have quite some power. He came from Pakistan, was educated in Saudi Arabia, later in the United States and now lives in Canada.

He is currently involved in the battle of his life: in January 2007 one judge will decide whether he should be granted refugee status in Canada or be deported to Pakistan.

(Emphasis mine).

Isaac’s hearing with the Canadian authorities has been scheduled for January 2007.

Michael goes on to say that

You can help. If you have links to relevant article about the treatment of apostates / not-good-Muslims / etc. in Pakistan or just want to show Isaac your support, please use the e-mail button at his blog, drop it off in one of the comment sections at his blog and or just leave a link or even simply a word of support in the comment section here.

So if you have any knowledge to share with Isaac please do so or support him any other way you can.

Hold the press: ‘Deutschland über Alles’ not the German anthemn since WW II

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Jörg W clears up some misunderstandings about the German national anthemn and German policies and attitudes towards Israel:

(1) “Deutschland über alles” (‘Germany above all’) is not the national anthem, but the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied (Song of the Germans) written in 1841.
Because the Nazis misused and reinterpreted the first stanza, Germany’s national anthem consists now only of the third stanza of the Deutschlandlied, i.e. the crowd was singing “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” (‘Unity and rule of law and freedom’).
In fact, singing the first stanza, “Deutschland über alles”, is associated with the Nazis only. It is the Nazi anthem. More background in the box to your right: =>
This means Matthew Beard, the reporter for The Independent, did not listen very well and does not know much about the country he is reporting about. Winds of Change and Instapundit did not notice the mistake, but unintentionally spread it on the internet.

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(3) Winds of Change expressed surprise that Germans show solidarity with Israel.
Why wouldn’t we wave Israeli flags to protest against Ahmadinejad? A recent PEW poll found that a higher percentage of Germans than Americans express negative opinions of Iran and oppose the acquirition of nuclear weapons. Another PEW poll concluded three weeks ago:

Germans, in particular, have become much more sympathetic to Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians. Nearly four-in-ten Germans (37%) say they sympathize with Israel in the Mideast conflict compared with 18% who sympathize with the Palestinians. In March 2004, Germans’ sympathies were evenly divided (24% Israel, 24% Palestinians).

The respected German paper Die Welt reported last weekend that Israel will receive two more German submarines, which cost one billion Euro, but the German government is paying 300 million. These submarines increase Israel’s deterrence against Iran by strengthening Israel’s nuclear second-strike capability, enabling Israel to destroy Iran even if Iran would launch a surprise nuclear attack on Israel first