Debunking Eurabia

Once again, reality has a liberal bias. Mentions rfmcdpei.

Summary: the %age of Muslims is small, and most of them aren't observant -- secular escapees from religious countries. (Blinding flash of the obvious: what kind of "Muslim" would be most likely to go to a strange and non-Muslim country?) Their birth rates drop quickly to those of the surrounding populations, or even lower. The European countries with the lowest birthrates are the ones with the biggest church influence, most observant and furthest from social democracy. Poland, Italy. NW Europe has the highest cohort birth rates. And finally:

I agree with Mr. Steyn on one point: Islamic faith is bad for people, and political Islam is a threat that deserves to be likened to fascism. But, unlike him, I realize that, as threats go, it's up there with the neo-Nazi threat to England.

Europe once faced a genuine fundamentalist threat, in the face of a declining population. From 1345 to 1750, the continent's population barely grew, and the church, a murderous, terrorist, woman-hating force, seized considerable power. It was not Christian culture, but rather the opposition to this Christian threat, that made Europe great: The Enlightenment not only destroyed the church as a power, but also created the fertility boom.

If Europeans, under similar demographic distress, were able to fend off a threatening political movement within a faith that was then held by almost 100 per cent of the population, they shouldn't have much to fear from a vanishing movement inside a 4-per-cent minority.

Europe already defeated its own virulent religions.

Source material, which Saunders distorted a bit by doing cross-country comparisons. In any particular country, the Muslim immigrant birth rate is higher. But that differential has been dropping rapidly. And "Muslims" aren't uniform, with initial immigrant birth rate correlation to country of origin (shock!) and local poverty or development.

In Pakistan, the Indo-Asian News Service recently reported that mosques "will soon distribute contraceptives and literature to spread awareness about the importance of family planning and safe sex" (18 December 2006). Some 22,000 clerics "will be appointed to spread the message of the benefits of a small family" according to the federal population planning minister. This approach is said to be borrowed from Bangladesh, which for decades has promoted aggressive family planning policies. Contraceptive practice is widespread in many Muslim countries, and fertility has declined substantially in Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, and several North African countries (Eltigani 2005). The large majority of Muslim countries support provision of family planning services.

One review of Muslim reproductive behavior (Karim 1997) concluded: "There seems to be no typical pattern of reproductive behavior which could be described as 'Islamic'. Islam as such seems to be neither a hindrance nor a stimulating factor in fertility decline at the global level."

So, Islam is friendlier to birth control low birth rates than the Catholic Church, not that Church is helping Poland and Italy.

Although fertility for all women is highest for Muslims, the fertility of married Muslims is the same as that of married Catholics and Protestants. Among married women aged 35-44 Muslims have had 2.3 births, Catholics 2.2, and Protestants 2.3

More Muslim women are married. There's more nuance as well, with immigrant fertility perhaps being inflated by births shortly after migration, but not repeated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
to quickly look at fertility rate by country, and see how France, Nordics, and Netherland lead Europe, with in fact southern and eastern Europe at the bottom.

Tracking the electoral vote

http://evstrength.blogspot.com/