Europe is Dying

Israel National News (Link) - Giulio Meotti (February 1, 2011)

Go to any children�s store in Amsterdam or Milan or Marseilles or Stockholm. Look at the Muslim women in headscarves.

Welcome to the future of Europe.

The global number of Muslims is expected to jump 35 percent in the next 20 years, growing twice as fast as the non-Muslim population, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published projections for growth in the Muslim population between 2010 and 2030.

According to the Pew report, the total number of people who identify themselves as Muslims is currently about 1.6 billion. That figure is expected to rise to 2.2 billion by the year 2030. It�s one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history. Muslims will make up 26.4 percent of the world�s population in 2030, compared with 23.4 percent now.

But the most frightening figure is about Europe. Some of the biggest increases in Europe�s Muslim population in absolute numbers over the next 20 years are expected to occur in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany. The Muslim populations in Italy and Sweden are projected to �more than double in size.�

Demography is the most important symptom of metaphisical exhaustion: without a cradle, it�s hard to sustain a civilization. And as Walter Laqueur warned in his magisterial book, these are �the last days of Europe.� A declining European fertility, a massive immigration from Muslim countries and a confident Islamist minority. could turn the cradle of Western civilization into its grave.

In the meanwhile, Europe is dying. Literally. It�s running out of babies. The number of births has dropped in comparison to the number of deaths year after year.

Italy for example, the most famous Catholic country that has always been seen as the stereotypical land of big, close-knit families, attains one of the world�s lowest levels of fertility: 1.3.

For a stable population you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That�s what America has: 2.1, give or take.

Recent data show that also Israeli demography is on the rise not only among religious families, but also among the bourgeois of Tel Aviv, where the average family still tends to have three children per couple.

There is no longer a single country in Europe where European people are having enough children to replace themselves when they die. But Italy is the first country in the world to experience what is known as �the crossing-over,� where the number of people who are over 60 exceeds the number of those who are under 20. The Pope�s city could be the stage for the sequel of Children of Men, the movie that sketched a sterile, dystopian world without babies.

As Christopher Caldwell argues in his magisterial book �Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,� �a society with total fertility of 1.3 (Italy, Spain, Eastern Germany and the Baltic nations) will fall in a short time to a quarter of its size.�

In the four largest cities of the Netherlands - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht - Mohammed, with the variations of Mohamed and Muhammad, is the first name among the newborns. It�s the same in the capital of European Union, Bruxelles.

The Jews are already leaving Antwerp, Amsterdam and Malmo.

In the 52nd chapter of his �Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,� the great historian Edward Gibbon speculated that if the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in A.D. 732, �perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.� When those words were published in 1788, the idea was a mere fantasy. Today Oxford debates �Israel�s right to exist� and preaches the Islamist ideology.

Gibbon was right, but before his time. �