According to a recent report by the Rand Corporation, “Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union.”
Needless to say, demographers consider a birthrate of 2.1 children per family to be the replacement level at which a society’s population size remains stable. Barring large-scale immigration, anything less means decline and dissolution.
A research study published last year in the International Journal of Andrology found a similar trend, concluding that, “Fertility rates have fallen and are now below replacement level in all European Union (EU) Member States. In the 20-year period since 1982,” it noted, “most EU Member State countries have had total fertility rates continuously below replacement level.”
At the bottom of the list are Spain, Italy and Greece, where birthrates hover around just 1.3 per couple, leading some forecasters to suggest, for example, that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by the middle of the century.
Others, such as Germany’s 1.37, the UK’s 1.74 and Sweden’s 1.75, aren’t all much better.
The figures are so bad that in many European countries, the total number of deaths each year has actually begun to exceed the number of births.
Indeed, the Council of Europe’s 2004 Demographic Yearbook warned that, “for Europe as a whole, more people died in 2003 than were born.” In 1990, said the yearbook, “three countries - Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary - had negative natural growth for the first time. By 2002, it was negative in fifteen countries.”
LAST YEAR, after the publication of statistics revealing that 30 percent of German women have not had children, Germany’s family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, caused a stir when she said that if her nation’s birth rate did not turn around, the country would have to “turn out the light.” And while Europeans may be busy everywhere but in the bedroom, the Muslim populations in their midst are proving far more expansive.
As columnist Mark Steyn points out in his must-read new book, America Alone, “What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed.”
Last month, the UK Daily Telegraph reported that, “Mohammed, and its most common alternative spelling Muhammad, are now more popular babies’ names in England and Wales than George.”
This, said the paper, using typically British understatement, “reflects the diverse ethnic mix of the population.”
But that “mix,” so to speak, is rapidly changing - and not in traditional Europe’s favor.
ISLAM, BY all accounts, is the fastest growing religion in Europe, spurred by immigration and high fertility rates. According to projections by the US federal government’s National Intelligence Council, the continent’s current Muslim population of 20 million will likely double by 2025.
And as Bruce Bawer noted last year in While Europe Slept, “Already, in most of Western Europe, 16 to 20 percent of children are Muslims; within a couple of generations many [European] countries will have Muslim majorities.”
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Original article
Author Steyn Sees Potential for ‘New Dark Ages’
By Kevin Mooney• CNS News • 1/11/07
Worldwide demographic shifts are working to the advantage of Islamic extremists, according to author and commentator Mark Steyn.
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, Steyn, author of “America Alone,” said foreign policy “realists” in the U.S. and Europe who seek to accommodate rather than confront Muslim radicals have bought into an “illusion of stability.”
At a time when much of the western world is experiencing “civilizational exhaustion,” Steyn said, the Muslim world is benefiting from significant population growth.
The G-8 nations, he said, have “given up on having children” while they acquiesce to a large influx of Muslim immigrants.
As a result of the demographic changes in Europe and parts of Asia, Steyn anticipates the Muslim world will have three reliable votes on the U.N. Security Council in the not too distant future. Furthermore, by 2050, Russia well may be a majority Muslim nation, he added.
In 1970, Steyn said, the developed world represented nearly 30 percent of the global population, in comparison to the Muslim world, which accounted for 15 percent.
By 2000, the developed world’s share of the global population had fallen to about 20 percent, and the Muslim world had increased to 20 percent, he said.
The demographic shifts are important, because although most Muslims dissociate themselves from terrorist acts, many share many of the objectives of extremists, including the desire to live under shari’a (Islamic law) in Europe, Canada and eventually the U.S., Steyn said.
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/news/news/here_comes_muslim_europe/
Topic: Here Comes Muslim Europe… (Read 2072 times)