In the previous four parts of "The Forever Jihad" (all found here), I wrote about Islamism's strategic goals, the distinction between Islamism and jihadism, asked whether suicide bombers are the new high priests of Islam, and explored where the riots in France last fall fit in to Islamic expansionism.
As a short review, here are the four goals of Islamism.
1. Expel America’s armed forces from Saudi Arabia, emplace Islamist regimes and sociopolitical order there and expel all non-Muslims of any sort,
2. Emplace Islamism in the other countries of the Persian Gulf,
3. Then reclaim Islamic rule of all lands that were ever under Islamic control and emplace Islamism there,
4. Convert the rest of the world to Islamism.
The distinction I drew between Islamists and jihadists is that while all jihadists are Islamists, not all Islamists are jihadists. Yesterday Dan Darling wrote here that "al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri's most [recent] statement ... that included yet another denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood's" - Islamism Central, they - "participation in Egyptian politics." Islamists are willing to achieve their goals without violence, although they don't shrink from violence per se in achieving their goals. Pacifists they are not. Jihadists, on the other hand, reply almost exclusively on violence and make it their primary, if not only tool.
While jihadism is more lethal now, Islamism is more pernicious and more dangerous to the West in the long term.
But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the “separation of church and state” took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe’s countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens. The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism’s survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.
Now comes Mark Steyn's invaluable essay in The New Criterion, "It’s the demography, stupid." He answers my question rather forthrightly up front:
Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.
This is a grim forecast, no doubt. Steyn's arguments are daunting to rebut. Without excerpting them at length, he basically points out the demographic doomsday looming over Europe. Baldly put: ethnic Europeans are not having enough children. For 100 men and women (we no longer really say "husbands and wives," do we?) of Europe to replace themselves in the next generation, they need to give birth to 105 children. That's 2.1 children per woman. But they're not.
Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent.
Europe's socialist economy is ungodly expensive to maintain and no one, no one, there is willing to cut back on the governmental or government-mandated financial entitlements that have grown up since the end of World War II. Steyn is no Nostradamus about Europe; many others have pointed out the demographic bombs awaiting Europe. "Bombs" plural I say because the decline of the birth rate at the low end of the age scale always means that the populations gets grayer at the high end. As I pointed out almost three years ago, demography is a double-sprung trap. Right now the median age of Americans is in the mid-30s, with most of Europe a little higher. But American adults are barely replacing themselves while Europeans are not, so by mid-century our median age will rise a tick and the Europeans' will rocket by 15 years to the low 50s. So who is going to pay for all those luscious European retirement benefits, especially since right now more than half of men across Europe stop working between age 55-65? And there's a financial paradox to be faced even if European governments and elites suddenly decided to encourage birthin' more babies:
They need more births, but that takes women out of the work force - and for longer than it does here, because of Europe's generally very generous labor-welfare rules. But taking women from the work force also decreases the tax revenue the state needs to continue propping up its welfare system.
Let us assume for argument's sake that the welfare-near-crisis states achieved a substantial jump in birth rates starting next year. They will probably go broke sooner than they will now because it will be basically 20 years before next year's babies become taxpayers and for those two decades they simply increase the welfare load by using government-provided services.
Can Europe bail water faster than the gunwales will go awash? I don't think so, but I hope I'm wrong.
Guess who the gap filler is. Steyn again:
Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. ... Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.Because Europeans are not having children anywhere close to the rate needed to maintain their own economies, much less their cultural civilization, they are importing Africans, Near Easterners and some Asians and Indians to do it for them. By far these immigrants are Muslim. And unlike ethnic Europeans, Muslims are having baby Muslims at breakneck speed. Consider Israel. I wrote about its demographic challenge as a beginning blogger in April 2002 in "The Palestinian population bomb" (all figures from 2002):
There are six million Israelis. Only 4.8 million are Jewish. Fifteen percent of Israel's citizens are Muslim Arabs, 900,000 people. They are Israeli Palestinians. They are, or are descended from, persons who did not become refugee in Israel's war for independence in 1947-1948. (The other five percent of Israelis are neither Muslim nor Jewish.)
There are more than three million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Right now there are four million Muslims in Israel/West Bank/Gaza. Jews outnumber them by a mere 800,000. At current growth rates of each, in 14 years the ratio will be reversed: 6.7 million Muslims and 6 million Jews. ...
The only effective thing that Israel can do, militarily, is create conditions that force the Palestinians to abandon violence so that socio-political agreements may be reached. But even if this happens, the Muslim population bomb will keep ticking.
Maybe these data compelled Ariel Sharon to make the breathtaking concessions to the Palestinians.
So there is an enormous, if not actually massive, population shift going on between Europe and its southern and easter littorals. Except it's not "between," it's one way. While the commentati lament the lack of economic integration of European societies for the North African and Middle Eastern immigrants, not altogether without justification, they may want to consider the population pressures that impel such large numbers of Muslims to move there. The Middle East itself is not exactly a land of brimming opportunity.
Europe long ago shed its Christian heritage. Church attendance in western Europe is generally less than 10 percent, often much less. I remember getting an email from a Norwegian pastor a few years ago in which he said that Sunday services were practically deserted; no one came to church except for weddings or funerals. When I lived in Germany in the mid-1980s, attendance was just under five percent. The result is not that for ethnic Europeans another religion has supplanted Christianity but that nothing has. Christian dynamism has been ejected from European society and has been replaced with . . . nihilism.As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism. ... We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end.
The result? Steyn again:
[T]he political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path... .
Into this demographic and religious vacuum has stepped political Islam. Islam has in the last 35 years or so become deeply expansionist in general, not just in its Islamist fringe. While giving only lip service to the idea of economic integration into their countries, the Europeans, except the British, have shunned the idea of socio-cultural-political integration of the masses of Muslim immigrants. The second and third generations of the first wave of immigrants on the 1960s have basically renounced the whole integrationist enterprise altogther. New immigrants now need have no expectation or even use for integration; there are ready-made Muslim ghettoes awaiting them across the continent, bought and paid for by the socialist, entitlement-as-an-entitlement governments and societies who need their labor more than their integration.
But the Europe-dwelling Muslims won't accept nihilism. It may be true that last fall's rioters were not rebelling from a very Muslim basis - this time. But the disenfranchised, immigrant populations of Europe are where Islamist evangelists are having their greatest successes, especially among those who have run afoul of the law. They offer order, structure and discipline to strangers living in a strange land, and for certain Old Europe is no longer offering any of them. Unlike Old European churches, mosques promise righteousness can be attained in this world and heaven in the next.
Mark Steyn writes that,... the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
For all the concern and countermeasures that jihadism commands for us now, it is non-violent Islamism that poses the greatest threat to the survival of the West as the West. Europe has simply abandoned the playing field. America is still on it, but only barely.
One of the things that stood out to me when reading the Massachusetts court decision legalizing gay marriage (don't worry its not about that) was the large number of laws benefitting married couples under the assumption that they would have children. They are listed on pages eight and nine here (pdf)
One small thing that can or should be done is to revamp those benefits so they flow to children or childraising. Nothing against those who choose to be childless, but that's not what those social benefits were intended for.
Spengler wrote an interesting article on Islam
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA10Ak01.html
Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from "the mouth of God by the hand of Moses", a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity's Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.
The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character? In that respect the Koran resembles the "Golden Tablets" of the Angel Moroni purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian bibles
Excellent analysis.
In this day and age far too many people dismiss the idea that any ideology, religion, or person would want to rule the entire world as a relic of a bygone age. They'll say that "sure, there are a few fanatics, but they're marginal."
au contraire. Hard as it is to grasp the notion that Islamists want to take over Europe first, then spread their religion to the rest of the world, it is real and it is happening. You'd have to be pretty blind these days not to see what is happening in Europe. As the post points out, the demographics are pretty clear. Couple that with the virtual non-existance of Christianity in western Europe, and you have a recipe for diasaster.
American volunteerism is different from the Euro sort. Note the French on a recent train ride.
Flight 93.
It is the difference between the citizen owning the government and the government owning the citizen.
I like your analysis - I read Steyn's article over the holidays. I wound up reading it 4 or 5 times and got more out of it each time. I can agree with most of your points - but I'm not sold that non-violent Islamism is the greatest danger. Yes, right now we are focused on jihadism and it's dangers. But the lack of other violence by main stream Islamists and the separation from the Jihadists that I see them doing doesn't make me worry about about their intentions. I see the jihadists effort lasting a long, long time. They're popping up in every corner and will continue to use low level violence (onesy-twosy terror acts). We will fight these brain-denuded people forever. The bigger concern is the nuclear one. It doesn't take but one or two to make this happen as long as the support network for the delivery is not uncovered. I think mainstream Muslims are tiring of this - almost as much as any other religion.
The lack of violence by what I call main-stream Muslims may, in fact, be the hammer needed to quell the rest of the violence. I don't think of Jihadi's as frustrated religionists - they are a political bunch who hide behind Islamism for cover. It's very convenient to quote Allah and kill yourself but it's not hard to convince brain dead Muslims to do this - brain dead Christians will say that God is punishing the Gulf Coast with Hurrican Katrina. In terms of intellect, what's the difference? Christians have no great political causes other than to recognize God and save their souls while Jihadi's are convinced that they get 22 virgins and Allah's honor roll. It is still shocking and confusing to us to see someone strap on a belt and blow themselves up - hopefully it always will be a shock to us. But reason and rationale - or as moonbats like to talk about "- understanding" - is useless. Jihadists have an agenda and it's the opposite of ours. It will be a test of will - who can last the longest while trying to convince the other side. And getting support from mainstream Muslims will be important. This, I think, given the Mark Steyn article on their growth, will be critical not just to Europe and the US, but to the world.
The worst thing about this is that what is needed to fix the problem is so un PC that even the Repubs wont even do more than wisper such fixes in back rooms. I fully support womens rights and all and dont have a problem with abortion but it is a sad fact that the women that should be having babies the healthy mentaly strong from good stock strong families are having abortions because it has become taboo for women to be housewives like that is degrating instead to be a strong women you have to have a career which in turns dooms your population. Houswives and Mothers are the most important piece to a society that is why in history women were not allowed in the military they were simple to important as men were replacable phisical strength was a secondary issue. All the while the weakest of our women are popping out babies left and right with no family structure and basicly becoming government funded baby factories. That is the demon in details that is not shown on none of these studies the fact that the families that in the past succesfull strong who would normaly have 5+ children becuase they could afford it and it was the thing to do have large healthy families these people are now having just 1 maybe 2 children while the weak non-families who in past days would have been forced to stop having kids due to shame and simply inability to provide are now having 5+ kids meaning that not only is the west being over taken by foriegn immigrant populations from within and out but that the western citizens that are taking the currents place is becoming weaker and weaker while at the same time the strong are crumbling its a two front loss from outside and within. The worst part is the only solution is to somehow change the mentality to that its cool honorable or important for women to once again become house wives and mothers instead of career women with kids pushed off to the twighlight years or not at all. That in itself intails many things like the fact that a mother must have a husband to stay at home and keep kids that means families something in todays "modern civilization" is just not accepted. These ideas will not go over well the LLL's will have a jihad themselves to stop even the discussion of such not to mention the Right today short the Christian right who I may add are themselves divided on the issue are way way to scared of the LLL's to even try to talk openly about.
The only politician of note I have seen even briefly mention some policies that could even start to change the death spiral is Newt who for reasons of competing with China has some education and family plans that entail massive tax breaks for those "families" that have children especially the ones who's women become mothers and stay home with the children educating the future,then one the gov even paying children for grades in classes of national interest like Math/Science which I think is a great idea I myself quit highschool becuase I wanted money and more hours at work if I could have matched that money need in my grades in math sience I probably would have been a engineer or something productive, but at 16 I just couldnt see that far nor could most of my friends. But in short the LLL's are too strong the Right are too scared and no body wants to face reality just take another Xyanx and chill.
In short I think the west is dead we are just what the 3rd world sees US as a deseased dying lion who if you get to close will kill you easily but if you wait he will soon go to sleep and not wake up until the Hyena's have his guts scrwen out being eatin.
I give US a 4/10 shot of tuning it around only becuase Europes death may-may just wake US up but more likly the problem will just run from Europe to the US making our chances even less. Europe I give a 2/10 chance and one of those chances are a Europe we really dont want to see come back.
C-Low:
I think there are things that can be done to change demographic trends, but all of them have trade-offs some of which are going to upset the Left and some the Right (some both). My proposal (#1) could be seen as many on the Right as promoting single-parent homes. I personally think the evidence is thin that adults are encouraged to enter and remain in relationships because of financial incentives (see divorce). On the other hand, I do think that people in stable, healthy relationships take into account financial considerations when deciding whether to have another child.
I believe that one of the consequences of the 1990s welfare reform is that the poor are having fewer children. I don't know that this was an intended consequence, but poor women entered the workforce, had to address child care issues and some have started going to trade schools and junior colleges. So the trade-off for increased productivity, decreased dependency, fewer kids raised in poverty and the intangible benefits of self-esteem includes a slowed demographic rate.
I don't think you reverse welfare reform, but clearly there are a number of financial incentives that would reverse the trend if we're willing to pay for them or even as you point out discuss them.
PD Shaw
I agree it can be turned around I was just bringing up the point that especially in demographics thier is a quality over quanity angle that should be considered. What I was saying is that it is a cultural thing that has destroyed the wests demographics. The fact that women who are mothers and houswives are degraded and pushed down in the "modern" culture when they are the corner stone of all civilizations. Simple baby factories single moms or even career women who just pop a kid then push them off to lock key kids are not going to produce the quality just the quanity. A poor kid with strong family backing and mother upbringing has a better chance than the rich kid with a sperm donar and a infant incubator. The advantage the west has had over the 3rd world has always been quality and that should be concentrated on to the fullest and then quanity of that but not quanity alone.
The main thing wrong is that the issue is so un-PC that everyone is scared to death to even wisper it and those that do are on as racist or one type or another unless you happen to be a christian were you are just ignored as a christian radical.
I recognized the problem twenty some years ago.
Four children later I'm proud to say that my kids will be a welcome addition to the world. #2 Son is a Junior at University of Chicago in languages. Straight As.
The rest are doing well if not as spectacularly.
Of course it has crimped my financial prospects.
Yet I can truly say there is no better adventure available in this life.
Families - they are not just a job, they are an adventure
Islam is Blasphely, plain and simple.