The Corner Report

By Alan Philps

One of the most popular items on YouTube, the video-sharing website, is a slickly produced clip called Muslim Demographics. Since it was posted in March it has attracted more than 10 million viewers, a score usually reserved for content of a more salacious nature. Far from it: this is a statistics-laden preview of the coming apocalypse, when Europe falls to the silent, swordless jihad of Muslim immigration.

@body arnhem:The authors of the eight-minute video do not declare themselves, but the content indicates that it is the work of an American Christian evangelical organisation using the supposed fate of Europe as a call to raise the alarm in the US before it goes the way of the Old Continent.

It is frightening stuff, intoned over a soundtrack of scary music. Because European women do not have enough babies, the continent is dying out; its fertility rate has already dropped below the point of no return. The wellhead of western civilisation is culturally dead, and only Muslim immigration keeps the place from becoming a desert.

Among the video’s more startling “facts” is that the German government has itself predicted that Germany will become a Muslim state by 2050. Half of all babies born in the Netherlands are Muslim. The Muslim population of Britain exploded thirtyfold in 30 years.

There is one problem: most of the statistics are implausible or downright wrong. The film declares, for example, that Muslim women in France have a total fertility rate of 8.1 children, against the French average of 1.8. Data on the religion of mothers are not collected in France, but if this astounding figure were true it would make French Muslim women the most productive in the world. The world record for fertility is held by Niger, at 7.15, while Algeria and Morocco – from where most French Muslims come – have a rather modest average of 2.38.

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Many experts have questioned parts of the argument, but the most serious rebuttal has been delivered by a BBC radio programme, More or Less, which specialises in exposing the abuse of statistics by governments, the media and lobby groups.

The programme tracked down Walter Radermacher, the German statistician who is quoted as predicting that Germany would become a Muslim state by 2050. He confirms that he did indeed sound the alarm about Germany’s low birth rate, but he never spoke of Islam, which is hardly surprising given that the nature of his work is numbers, not religions.

All manner of alarming statistics melt away under scrutiny. The video claims that 25 per cent of the population of Belgium is Muslim. The real figure is 6 per cent. If half of all babies born in the Netherlands were Muslim, as the video proclaims, it would require each Dutch Muslim woman to have more than 20 children.

We should not be surprised that the grim science of demography is used to spread moral panic. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman, asserted that population growth would be checked only by global famine, and enjoined sexual abstinence on the poor so that they should not add to the problem. Since his day, however, demographers have learned to be more cautious in their predictions. Indeed, the only certainty is that crude extrapolations from today’s total fertility rates will be wide of the mark in 40 years.

But that still leaves unanswered the question of why there is a huge market for such scare stories. In the discussion forums about this video, you meet again and again the view that, while the statistics might be flawed, they reveal a deeper truth that is ignored by governments and the mainstream media, who are accused of covering up reality in the name of anti-racism.

Part of the explanation lies in the frailty of human perception, where the exotic is more noticeable than the routine. On the streets of London, one woman in a burqa makes more of an impression than 1,000 men in suits.

Like all big lies, however, it clings to a kernel of truth. And that truth is that no government in the European Union ever sought votes declaring that it would encourage mass immigration. Instead, governments have dissembled. The foreigners were just “guest workers” (as in Germany) and would go “home” one day, or they would always be hidden away, like the 100 immigrants discovered living in the sewers of Rome in April. No government dared to say that Europe is heading, at least in its major cities, for a multicultural society that would require a re-evaluation of what it means to be European.

This failure of nerve has opened the way for deep distrust of everything official about immigration, and a ready market for alarmist propaganda. There are elements of this panic in the US, where mass Hispanic immigration is changing the face of society, a panic boosted by lingering distrust of a mixed-race president whose middle name is Hussein. In Europe, in the past, distrust was aimed at Afro-Caribbean communities. Now it is the Muslims, who are lumped together despite their widely differing cultural backgrounds and socio-economic status.

The ghettoisation of parts of some major European cities is already under way. This is hardly surprising: immigrants, such as Jews or French Protestants, have always huddled together for comfort. But the issue of integration of immigrant communities, particularly those that do not value female education, is a legitimate political issue. With well paid jobs becoming ever scarcer, as Europe goes through a period of deflation, it will be harder and harder for the poor – white, brown and black – to achieve a decent standard of living. This will be the real issue confronting European governments in years to come.

For the moment, the Muslim Demographics video remains top of the Google search list – and you have to look long and hard to find the material that debunks its bogus statistics.

aphilps@thenational.ae

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