Muslim demographics, the video:
The other night I went out for a jog. “Rattle the bones over the stones,” as the old song ran. I chanced to find a neighbor walking his dog and mentioned that I was still doing the same thing, trying to save the world, save babies, remove prejudice, whatever you want to call it. He mentioned a short movie on Youtube that had impressed him called “Muslim Demographics.”
In due course I looked at it. It seemed rather odd to be watching a clip that dealt with some of the numbers I have been pondering and saying, “I say, old chap, it’s not as bad as all that you know.” Actually it is worse, a LOT worse in the long run, but the actual numbers did not strike me as what I had found when I looked.
So let me describe it a bit. First, it is done with highly professional polish. Oh for that kind of presentation and a message that simple! The video has been seen fifteen million times, while I have only had something around fifty thousand visitors over a similar time. Second, it is a few years old. The numbers tend be off because they are old.
The clip begins with the announcement that a society must have a reproductive rate of 2.11 children per woman or die. That I have heard before and the truth cannot be far off. Then comes the shocker. No country has ever had fertility drop below 1.9 per woman and reversed it. I’m not sure what that means. If it means no country has ever then returned to viable fertility, then maybe it’s pretty much true. No counter example comes to mind, although immigration sort of muddies the waters here. But if it means no country has fallen below that level and risen again, then recent experience says the contrary. In the past ten years a number of developed countries that had fallen lower than that have shown a rise. Pretty generally, one sense a sigh of relief. The UN is predicting that populations will stabilize in the rich world at close to present levels. That may be a bit sanguine. Nobody has actually recovered to 2.1 that I know of. So I can buy that.
But then we are told that below 1.3 it cannot correct itself because that would take 80 to 100 years, longer than an economy could survive with such low fertility. This is very bad news. But a crucial question remains. If fertility is a matter of choice, it could recover overnight; all right it could recover in nine months. If fertility is not a matter of choice, then there is no reason to invoke an economic dimension. So we are left with a lugubrious prediction that requires more explanation, not to mention more evidence. There is, indeed a reference: Ed Vitagliano Europe’s Chastisement: How the Abandonment of Christianity May Be Leading to Disaster. Vitagliano is real enough. He edits the journal of the American Family Association called AFA JOURNAL. His essay, upon which the clip draws, is at http://www.battlefortruth.org/ArticlesDetail.asp?id=167
The essay is rather more measured than the clip on Youtube, but the bottom line is about the same.
The clip then goes on with some statistics, some seem right, some seem quite off. But one can discount them. It is clearly a message with a moral, and one tends to discount it at such. And indeed the bottom line for the clip is not so much, “We need to get serious about having babies,” as “We need to get serious about converting all the immigrating Muslims to Christianity so our culture doesn’t die.” The notion that the immigrants will follow the populations of the host countries down the long walk does not come up. I don’t think it is even suspected.
There is a sort of anti-Muslim feel I get from the clip, but it might be that it is pro-Christian and I am reading it wrong.
All right. Film clip. Warning that the culture of the West is going to be absorbed by rising Islam. Lots of emotional content. Needs some discounting and some of the numbers seem off.
The scary bit is the “debunkers.” A few clips have been produced trying to put the video into perspective. They are not nearly so polished. And their numbers are about what I had thought. In sum: sometimes the video is correct, sometimes it is wrong (and always in the direction of alarm) and for some of the claims there simply are not good statistics. That still leaves a lot of room for sympathy with the message of the video. And this time there is less temptation to discount the information. But the bottom line of the video goes, alas, unchallenged.
At one point the clip says that the government of Germany has announced that by 2050 Germany will be a Muslim nation. The debunkers actually interviewed the official who was supposed to have said that. He denied it. He was livid. He was in high dudgeon. He made it convincingly clear that he had never intended to say, had never said, anything of the sort. What did not come through was any indication of whether such a prediction was plausible whether at that time or at any time in the future.
The failure to deny the prediction, when it would so advance the purpose of the debunkers comes rather close to being an endorsement.
Of course neither side has any clue that there is an epigenetic mechanism underlying the whole issue, that it is a threat to migrants even more than to hosts, and that it has no clear happy ending in sight for anybody. Their whole emphasis is on relative market share in religion.
But alas, there is the biological side. When it comes to religion, the stork simply does not care. That may seem blasphemy to some readers of scripture, but if it is not taken into account, then there may indeed come a day when there will no longer be anybody left to say, “Blasphemy.”
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