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Toronto Star Archive

A new book (released this month) seeks to refute the claim that Muslim immigration poses an existential threat to the European peoples, their culture and religious integrity. “The Myth of the Muslim Tide” by Doug Saunders has so far been well-recieved, even charming a pleasant review from anti-immigration website Vdare.com.

The central contention of the book is that the Islamisation scenario uses demographic estimates based on the fertility of first-generation immigrants. This is a bad idea, according to Saunders, because newly settled migrants tend to be considerably more fertile than their offspring. Second and third generation immigrants typically reproduce more in kind with the country of their birth, including Muslims.

Various statistics shown in the book appear quite devasting to the arguments I am used to. True enough it seems, second generation Muslims do have smaller broods, and the same with the next generation, and the next…

Perhaps the long-term won’t be worse than the short-term after all?

Well, that would be true were I the kind of ‘believer’ Saunders seeks to educate.

Personally, I do not believe that Islam will take over ‘Europe’, and I never have believed this. There will be no triumphant Islamic parades in Warsaw, or Kiev, or even Edinburgh. Nor will the folk of Cumbria, Cardiff or Cork be subdued in this way.

The idea that Muslim growth rates in Europe are so high that the entire continent shall be enslaved is a ‘myth’ indeed. As mythical as the idea of the ‘black flag of Jihad flying over the White House’ so beloved by Islamic fantasists.

But with that said, I do believe we are on course to lose parts of Europe.

The Netherlands is a case in point. The demographics there cannot be sensibly denied. The population growth of ‘Dutch’ Muslims will only peak around mid-century and that’s a pretty dire prognosis given how things already are. France too, is due to become one fifth Islamic within decades, thereby opening the door for a movement to violently subdue the other four-fifths. Sweden can hardly be bothered to track numbers within its borders, but reasonable estimates also point to a fifth of the country falling before the tide rolls back. Then there’s Belgium and Denmark etc.. etc…

My point is – Why should Europe concede any of its security or cultural integrity to a hostile religion? What do we get out of it? Where is the gain?

Thinking about Saunders’s book reminded me of an often ignored prophecy in Samuel Huntingdon’s Opus ‘Clash of Civilisations’. In this book Huntingdon predicted – with remarkable accuracy – the Islamisation threat to (parts of) Europe. He also predicted however that by around 2025, fears of ‘Islamisation’ in Europe would give way to fears of ‘Africanisation’.

Huntingdon based this on the longer-term demographics of North and Sub-Saharan Africa respectively. Currently, demographic growth in the Arab world is declining towards the global mean. In Sub-Saharan Africa by contrast, the population is set to DOUBLE by 2050 to 2.4billion. If migration increases at the same rate (and carries the same hue) then Huntingdon appears to be correct.

But this is all besides the point.

Whichever tsunami eventually hits hardest is a matter for the future. Now is still the time to build defences.

D, LDN.

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