Dispelling the Eurabia Myth

Back in 2004 a “much cited” study authored by the US National Intelligence Council put forward a number of possible projections for the numbers of Muslims who would living in Europe by the year 2025. At its most aggressive, it came up with the scenario of an increase from 20 million today (about 5% of the population) to 38 million in 2025. It turns out that the study had predicated these projections on ”diplomatic and media reporting as well as government, academic, and other sources”.

The study is shown to be an overstatement of the data that it presents itself. Says Jytte Klausen, an authority of Islam in Europe at Boston’s Brandeis University:

“There is a quite deliberate exaggeration, as has often been pointed out—but the figures are still being cited,”

This comes from the lead article in the current edition of Newsweek which conclusively debunks the Eurabia myth once and for all in the article ‘Dispelling the Myth of Eurabia’.

As the article says, the numbers of the forecasts simply don’t add up. It also talks shows how the shear diversity of the Muslim demographic in Britain is the very reason why it could never operate as a bloc  - another nightmare scenario which fueled any number of alarmist writers such as the likes of the semi-literate disk jockey Mark Steyn, the oddball Melanie Philips and the man who claimed Barack Obama was a ’secret Muslim’, Daniel Pipes.

Numbers of births and demography:
Bad news for the centre-right alarmists as this old canard is turned on its head.

For the number of Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims by midcentury, it would require either breeding on a scale rarely seen in history or for immigration to continue at a pace that’s now politically unacceptable. More likely, new controls will slow Muslim immigration. The birthrate for Muslim immigrants is also likely to continue to decline, as it has tended to do, with greater affluence and better health care. There is no Europewide data available, but one study says fertility rates among Turkish-born women in the Netherlands fell from 3.2 in 1990 to 1.9 in 2005, barely above the figure for native-born Dutch. Over the same period, the equivalent figure for Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands dropped from 4.9 to 2.9. Also, fertility rates are edging upward in some Northern European countries, which would offset some of the Muslim growth. Bottom line: given the number of variables, demographers are loath to make predictions about the number of Muslims in Europe in the years to come. “You would almost have to make it up,” says Carl Haub, the senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. And the idea of a Muslim majority any time soon? “Absolutely absurd.”

The homogeneous Muslim bloc:
Bad news for Islamists who thrive on the notion that Islam in Europe is a monolithic entity. No more.

Moreover, the myth of Eurabia implies the existence of a united Islam, a bloc capable of collective and potentially dangerous action. The truth is that there are no powerful Muslim political movements in Europe, either continentwide or at the national level, and the divisions that separate Muslims worldwide, most obviously between Sunnis and Shiites, are apparent in Europe as well. Each major nation in Europe has drawn Muslim immigrants from distinct regions of the Islamic world, often former colonies, with different traditions and outlooks. A British Muslim from Pakistan would struggle to communicate with a French Muslim from Algeria. A second-generation Muslim from Turkey living in Germany will have little in common with a newly arrived Moroccan across the border in Belgium. Sharp differences exist even within national frontiers. In Germany, more than one in 10 Muslims are Alawites, who aren’t even recognized as coreligionists by the more orthodox.

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6 Comments

  1. NielsC
    Posted July 21, 2009 at 2:59 PM | Permalink

    The main problem in most north european countries isn’t the number of muslim immigrants, but that a great number of them has formed a new ‘lumpenproletariat’. It’s characterized by living outside the society, and a ridicolous high crime rate.
    One of the main problem is that muslims womens participiation in the labour market is very low. The women therefore have no experience of the society they are living in to use when they are educating their kids.
    There is only two solutions to this problem, one, create structural policies that forces women to workplace participiation, secondly put limits to immigration due to family reunions.

  2. me
    Posted July 23, 2009 at 1:15 AM | Permalink

    This exact same article was of course published by David T on HP the day before
    heheheh – Sid/Faisal you dont change

  3. me
    Posted July 23, 2009 at 2:01 AM | Permalink

    “another nightmare scenario which fueled any number of alarmist writers such as the likes of the semi-literate disk jockey Mark Steyn, the oddball Melanie Philips and the man who claimed Barack Obama was a ’secret Muslim’, Daniel Pipes.”

    You forgot to mention your head Douglas Murray he of

    “So it is worth reminding ourselves of the basics of the problem. No European country’s Muslim population is currently higher than 10%—which ordinarily would be alright—not ideal, but alright. What makes it a problem is not only that native European birth-rates are falling, but that Western relativists are acting as a megaphone for the Muslim minority, making the volume of that minority exponentially greater and more threatening. This megaphone effect—the unequal power which Islam currently wields, and the power it will increasingly wield as it grows, courtesy of immigration and higher than average European Muslim birth-rates—is cause for great worry.”

    It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. … [Italics added.] Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.

    Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition. We in Europe owe—after all—no special dues to Islam. We owe them no religious holidays, special rights or privileges. From long before we were first attacked it should have been made plain that people who come into Europe are here under our rules and not theirs. There is not an inch of ground to give on this one. Where a mosque has become a centre of hate it should be closed and pulled down. If that means that some Muslims don’t have a mosque to go to, then they’ll just have to realise that they aren’t owed one.

    Perhaps because Spitton collaborates with him!

  4. Posted July 23, 2009 at 10:35 AM | Permalink

    We don’t collaborate with Douglas Murray but we are on the same side when it comes to taking on anti-Islamism.

    Other common ground:

    We strongly believe in the secular state such and freedom of speech and regard them as inalienable principles of a liberal society. We are strongly against Islamism which attempts to present an extremist interpretation of political Islam as definitive. We reject their propaganda that all Muslims either support them or are “technically apostates” for not supporting them.

    The Spittoon presents the side of Muslims who reject this worldview and to show how Islam can accomodate multiple views and not only the modernist, regressive articulation of this unctuous expression of Islamism which is a totalitarian aberration, which some Muslims have fallen into the trap of identifying with, particularly in the UK.

    If that looks like “collaboration” to you, then that’s a failure on your part.

    You might want to analyse how you reconcile your dishonesty and hypocrisy when it comes to your tacit support of (or turning a blind eye to) genocidal regimes which brutally repress and use torture against their own (Muslim) citizens.

    Douglas Murray, as far as I can tell, has never supported the wholesale murder of large swathes of Muslims. But Islamists like yourself have, many a time, and you continue to do so.

  5. me
    Posted July 24, 2009 at 4:26 PM | Permalink

    “We don’t collaborate with Douglas Murray but we are on the same side when it comes to taking on anti-Islamism. ”

    Hooriya Ahmed, Spitoon editor, is a researcher at the CSC run by Murray!!!

    BTW What do books attcking the Quran and the Prophet (sallAllahu alayhi wasalaam) as false have to do with “anti-Islamism” ?

  6. Posted July 24, 2009 at 4:33 PM | Permalink

    Dear “me”. Why don’t you run off and play in the NWFP with all the other jihadists? Or are you lacking the necessary cojones?

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