Islamization of Europe: The Numbers Don’t Lie
Few readers of this website will be unaware that over the last several years plenty of books, including my own While Europe Slept, have warned about the present and future effects of the rise of Islam in Europe. Some writers, notably Christopher Caldwell and Mark Steyn, have gone into considerable detail about the now widely recognized fact that the low birth rate among ethnic Europeans, the high birth rate among European Muslims, and the steady arrival of new Muslim immigrants on the continent will mean an increasingly Muslim Europe in the decades to come and, ultimately, a majority Muslim population in one country after another.
FrontPage readers will also likely be aware that ever since these books starting coming off the presses, any number of supposedly intelligent and well-informed critics have vehemently dismissed such prognostications as alarmist nonsense, noting that in this or that European country the Muslim percentage of the population is still quite modest, and suggesting that there is no reason to expect the current numbers to climb very drastically in the years to come. The fact that these critics actually appear to buy their own arguments, and that they are able to persuade other reasonably intelligent people to believe them as well, only demonstrates the remarkable level of ignorance of basic math on the part of many individuals with pricey liberal educations.
A few recent news stories out of Europe confirm that concerns about the continent’s skyrocketing Muslim populations are, in fact, anything but alarmist. On August 8, for example, Britain’s Daily Telegraph actually permitted into its pages an article reporting that “Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policy-makers are talking about it.” According to the Telegraph, Spain’s foreign-born population rose from 3.2% in 1998 to 13.4% in 2007, and in Brussels, “the top seven baby boys’ names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza.” The Telegraph cited the highly euphemistic conclusion of a recent report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that the rapid introduction of large numbers of Muslims into Europe results in “a difficult social fit.”
Similarly, an August 26 article in Denmark’s Dispatch International revealed that the number of Muslims in Denmark and Sweden, which had previously been uncertain (with estimates ranging widely), could now be stated with an unprecedented degree of precision, based on a meticulous study of the records of given names in the two countries. Within ten or twenty thousand, the real number of Muslims (not including unregistered illegal aliens) was about “574,000…in Sweden and 256,000 in Denmark,” meaning “that Muslims make up 6.05% of Sweden’s population and 4.59% of Denmark’s.” The Swedish figure was up from around 3.21% in 1998: “In other words, the number of Muslims has roughly doubled over the period 1998-2011.” As for Denmark, although the climb was less precipitous, that country’s center-right governments between 2001 and 2011, while often criticized as Islamophobic, turned out to have “hardly made a dent in the Muslim growth rate.” As for Norway, the Norwegian website document.no reported on September 5 that just over 38% of all newborn babies in Oslo now have “mothers with foreign national backgrounds.”
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