Month: November 2005

“These children and their families are our allies.”

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Michael Yon shows us who and what American soldiers have been fighting and bleeding for. Whether you agree with how the war started, or are disappointed with how it has been going, you have to hope that there can be some kind of decent future for these children. I hope and pray that after all the suffering on all sides that we do not abandon these children into the hands of men like Zarqawi and those who support him. What is the chance that we can help bring about a stable, orderly, lawful Iraq? Our soldiers and Marines have done everything possible and everything that has been asked of them. Will that be enough? I really don’t know. I hope so.

Number/Theory

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Ralf wrote a thoughtful post where he states that Anglosphere claims of a future domination in Europe by Muslims is simply not supported by any evidence. In fact he thinks that it’s nothing but nonsense. The numbers of non-Muslims are so great that there’s no chance they will be overwhelmed, and a glance at German population statistics bears this out.

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.

Ralf doesn’t link to any sources which back up his claims on the total number of Muslims in Europe, or that the birth rate of Muslim immigrants decline by the 3rd generation. That doesn’t surprise me, but only because there seems to be some disagreement as to the numbers involved and sources are hard to come by.

This page at The Islam Project states that there are “35 to 50 million Muslims” which lived in Western Europe in 2000, numbers which are significantly higher than what Ralf asserts to be the “very high end of the estimate”. The figures found at IP should be taken with a grain of salt for two reasons, though. The first is that they themselves admit that “no reliable statistics are available”. The second is that IP is devoted to promoting Islam in a positive light, so they have a strong incentive to inflate the numbers.

Daniel Pipes wrote an article where he asserted that “5% of the E.U., or nearly 20 million persons” identified themselves as Muslim. He didn’t link to any source for his numbers either, but he did link to this article which discusses Europe’s declining population.

An article at The Times Online places the number of European Muslims at 13 million. Where did they get that number? The author doesn’t say.

An op-ed which originally appeared on the United Press International wire also states that Europe has no more than 13 million Muslims, but that they comprise 10% of France’s population.

And so it goes, on and on. No hard data, the numbers cited are conflicting, and it’s extremely difficult to separate an example of biased agenda-driven reports from thoughtful analysis. The problem is made worse by the fact that professional journalism rewards those who publish alarmist fare while ignoring boring articles that claim there’s really nothing much going on. The bottom line is that the claims of an Islam dominated Europe might be hogwash, but so might the claims that there’s no problem at all.

I notice two glaring blind spots in Ralf’s post.

The first is the assumption that Muslims are only created through childbirth. Islam aggressively recruits, and the number of European Musilms appears to be growing while the number of Christians seems to be shrinking. (This presupposes that a citizen will be one or the other instead of being neither, of course, so it isn’t wholly compelling to me.)

The other problem with his argument is that he seems to be ignoring the fact that France has real potential crises. 10% of the population is simply too large a segment to ignore, and there’s no reason to think that the numbers won’t continue to grow.

Most of the democratic governments in Europe are based on the parliamentary system. A party that controls about 35% of the vote can muster enough support to defeat their opponents. We already know that 10% of France’s population is Muslim. Is there a chance that it could approach 35%? If so, how long is it going to be before it reaches that number? Even if the rest of Europe manages to marginalize or assimilate their Islamic citizens, a nuclear armed France with a ruling government formed from a fundamental Islamic political party isn’t a reassuring picture to contemplate.

But so far no major political party has emerged in France that claims to speak for the Muslims. Why this is so is beyond me, but I’m sure there are reasons. It’s not clear that it will never happen because it hasn’t yet, though.

It’s important to define your own position when discussing a contentious subject such as this one. I’ve never said that we will see a Europe with an Islamic majority, but I’ve always maintained that the numbers of muttering malcontents presently there are large enough to become a very serious problem unless they are assimilated into the general population. That, I think, is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint.

But, of course, I could be wrong.

Nonsense on European demographics

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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.

Arrogance American Style

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Solipson says he admires much about America; we admire much about Europe. Lex, indeed, is constantly reinforcing the history and affection that lie between us and the wide-spread Anglosphere – which includes at least one European nation. And most of us, immigrants that we are, lovers of the western tradition that we are, do not want a huge wall between us and them. (And of course, of late, many of our posters are not American and are rightly proud of their own loyalties.)

Nonetheless, I come to our little blog & his comments having just read a Wall Street Journal piece by Pete du Pont, “Ceasefire in Tunisia”; here we see how wide the breach is in in both tone & content. A readiness to impugn our motives is not, well, attractive. But the real sadness comes from the fact that we revere a value that we often see as perhaps uniquely American but whose ancestors we recognize in that European tradition from which we were spawned.

As Lex has noted, even such an Anglophile as James noted again and again the “honesty” of his Americans, their direct method of speech. It is one we still cherish. But we have reasons other than the fresh charm we see in it (and Europeans may well not) nor does it come (at least solely) from the vulgarity and naiveté Europeans find. We believe it, well, right. My idea of hell would be life lived in code; our inner as well as our society’s health require an ability to speak honestly, directly, words coming up and out with no filter, no hedging, no reinterpreting in “appropriate” words, muted feelings. With such a distraction at such a level, we become less intent on (and less good at) capturing reality. It wastes time but more importantly energy. Perhaps Europeans can not understand how much we are struck by such experiences as the writer describes in his concluding paragraphs:

When the U.S. attends those IGF meetings, our representative will surely be reminded of the repeated advice Tony Mauro, the Supreme Court correspondent for The American Lawyer, recalls receiving from Europeans at a run-up meeting of the U.N. Internet group in Budapest three years ago. Do not invoke the First Amendment in Internet discussions, he was told, for it is viewed as a sign of U.S. arrogance.

If the U.N. establishment believes free speech is arrogance, we can be confident that U.N. control of the Internet would be calamitous.