Ralf Goergens

From Sign and Sight

Sonia Mikich, host of the political program Monitor at the German public broadcaster WDR:

I feel offended.

Zealots are nailing veils onto the faces of my sisters in Afghanistan and Pakistan and are busy hanging women, homosexuals, adulterers and non-believers.

…

I demand that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Indonesia and Egypt apologise to me. Otherwise I am unfortunately forced to threaten, beat up, kidnap or behead their citizens. Because I am somewhat sensitive about my cultural identity.

I feel offended.

Fanatics are blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, marvellous cultural monuments.

…

I demand that Hamas, the spokesman of the French Muslims and the Director of the Al-Azhar-University apologise to me. Otherwise I will never spend a holiday at the Taj Mahal, I will call for a boycott of Palestinian fruit and I will set the embassies of Tunisia, Qatar and Bangladesh on fire.

I expect understanding for this at the very least – my feelings are absolute and must be expressed globally.

…

I feel offended.

Videos show journalists, truck drivers and NGO workers having their throats slit or their heads chopped off. Jews see themselves represented as cannibals and pigs, Western women as decadent sluts. Apolitical engineers have to fear for their lives.

The Carnival of German-American relations is up at Atlantic Review and GM’s Corner

I myself had contributed my post “A postmortem of the 2005 German general elections”.

My thanks to the team at Atlantic Review and George Mann Roper for this great idea, and hosting the carnival.

Whenever the English (there are separate Sctottish and Welsh teams) soccer team is playing against the German team, the English fans like to sing:

There Were Ten German Bombers In The Air, There Were Ten German Bombers In The Air, There Were Ten German Bombers, Ten German Bombers, Ten German Bombers In The Air.

And The RAF From England Shot One Down. And The RAF From England Shot One Down. And The RAF From England, The RAF From England, The RAF From England Shot One Down.”

With each repetition the RAF shoots down another German bomber.

Thing is, next year the Soccer World Championship tournament will take place in Germany, and the English national coach Sven-Goran Eriksson doesn’t want the English fans to sing that song in Germany: ‘It is really important that we respect our German hosts.’

This attempt to avoid giving offence is quite worthy. Unfortunately the same spirit isn’t always prevailing here in Germany. A popular German childrens’ song with the same melody as ‘Ten German Bombers’ is called ‘‘Zehn kleine Negerlein (Ten Little Negroes), and in each stanza a ‘Little Negro’ dies is a different way – respectivily drowning, getting shot, gluttony, a spell from an evil witch, stuck in s swamp, drinking too much beer, gluttony again, sunstroke, excessive grief, and run over by a horse carriage.

The Swedish coach’s exaggerated sensitivity is quite amusing, but I think we should emulate him as far as our children’s songs are concerned. It is easy to imagine the outcry by the German media if it turned out that children in the American south were taught songs like this, for example.

Jim Bennett asked in the comments of this post:

One of the chief issues here is whether the birthrates of second-and third-generation immigrants from high-birth-rate countries remains high, or whether the immigrants assimilate to local values. Historically, immigrants from high-birth-rate countries have adopted birth rates of their hosts throughout the West, except for religious communities that deliberately isolate themselves from the mainstream. These have included, in the USA and Canada, groups like Old Order Amish, Hutterites, and certain strictly-observant Orthodox Jews. The question then becomes, if the radical Islamists set the tone in segregated enclaves, including enforcing Salafist codes of behavior on women, will this not continue the traditional attitudes about birth rates as well?

This English language page at the German Interior Ministry’s website gives a first hint:

Sex, age and birth rates
In 2003, 3.4 million foreigners (47%) were women and 3.9 million (53%) were men. With an average age of 34, foreigners are younger than native Germans by eight years. In 2003, of the 76,200 children born to foreigners in Germany, 39,355 received foreign citizenship (6% of all births in Germany); the remaining 48% were given German citizenship on the basis of the Nationality Act, in effect since 1 January 2000 . In 1999, the fertility rate of foreign women was 1.8 births, with a downward tendency, compared to 1.4 births for German women.

So even the somewhat more fertile immigrants don’t have a high enough birthrate to replace themselves. As indicated, their birthrates also are declining. According this German website, they quickly converge with the birthrate of the general German population, and soon will have 1.3 children per couple, the same as we have.

Zuwanderer gleichen ihr Reproduktionsverhalten schnell an das der “Einheimschen” an. So haben die in Deutschland lebenden Italiener und Spanier inzwischen noch weniger Kinder als die Deutschen. Die Geburtenrate der Türken Deutschlands nähert sich in schnellem Sinkflug von derzeit 1,7 dem statistischen Durchschnittsniveau der Deutschen von 1,3.

(Availability of the website seems to be sporadic).

There are religious zealots here, but not nearly enough to have an effect on Muslim birthrates, as Jim speculated. The reason why Germans have so few children are the huge economic disincentives – having children is by far the leading cause of poverty. While extended families could help young couples to have more than two children, all their resources would be used up, and the sacrifice is too much for all but the most traditionalist Muslims.

Ulrich Speck mentioned in the comments to the same post that Turkish men often marry wives from Turkey, rather than a Turkish woman who grew up in Germany. While this creates problems for the integration of the children, since their mothers rarely learn proper German, it has little impact on Turkish birthrates. Many Turkish woman who grow up here either remain single, or marry a German man or at least one from some other European country.

As to religious conversions: For every German converting to Islam there are many Muslims who capitulate before our secular society. They give up teaching their children any values, to wit, Muslim girls running around half-naked in warm weather. While some children of such parents will turn to Islamists for values and guidances, hedonism and consumerism are more frequent attitudes

Regardless of ethnicity or religion, having children has to become affordable again, or Germany will gradually become an empty country, rather than an Islamicized one. We also can’t afford to let a single child’s potential go to waste, for we haven’t any to spare. Even if we just wanted to keep our current, already undesirable age structure of the population constant, we would have to let in more than 100 million immigrants over the next decades. This would be neither possible nor even desirable, so we have to make the best of an unenviable situation. Irrational fears of a so-called ‘Eurabia’ would be a distraction and a hindrance towards that goal.

Alexandra Cohen at Brussels Journal makes some good points on multiculturalism here, but loses contact with reality towards the end. She writes this about the rioters in France:

They are Europe’s future because they are its youth, and they know it. The liberal media, by unqualifyingly describing them as “youths” confirmed this for all to see. What we witnessed in France in the first half of November 2005 was the writing on the wall…

(Emphasis mine).

Let’s check that assertion: As it happens, Germany alone has 17 million people under the age of 20. In other words, people under 20 in this country alone outnumber the 15 million Muslims (and that’s the very high end of the estimate) in all of Europe, of all ages, by a considerable margin.

Immigrants’ birthrates in the first generation are higher than the ‘native’ birthrate, but the difference narrows by the second, and disappears by the third generation. Many of the Muslims living here also are retirees, who originally had intended to work here and then to return to Turkey, but found the prospect of retirement in such a poor country too unpalatable. European immigration laws also are much more restrictive than the American ones, so immigration also won’t do much to increase the number of Muslims in Europe, even including illegal immigrants.

All this ‘Muslims are taking over Europe’ nonsense is nothing but ‘Anglospheric’ wishful thinking. I’m really getting fed up with this bullshit. This also includes talk about an alleged European ‘demographic death spiral’. I’ll address this in a upcoming post.

One last point, and subject of another post, is that the Muslim world is actually in much worse shape, demography-wise than Europe, given their state of economic and social development. If anything, we are going to take over the ‘Ummah’, rather than Europe becoming Muslim.

Update James asks about the number of Islamic converts. According to this website there are 14.000 German Muslim converts, and there are 250 to 350 new ones each year. As I responded in the comments, this is demographically insignificant, even if such converts could be a security headache, since they are indistinguishable from the ‘native’ population. It also has to be taken into consideration that many more Muslims than this are Muslims in name only, while many others are members of sects persecuted in Muslim countries, and therefore anything but sympathetic to Sunni or Shia fanatics.

I wrote above that 15 million is at the high-end for an estimate of Mulims living in the European Union, and I have no reason to change that in face of the several different numbers James posted. Muslim organization like to wildly overstate the numbers of the faithful, so estimates based on that are highly unreliable.

Update II Please see this new post.