[brraverishhh]

What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. 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. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birth rates are declining all over the world—eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase. 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.

1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life—the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge—isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.

And by 2020?

So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “western.” 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.

Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called “post-Christian” civilizations—as a prominent EU official described his continent to me—are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so.

[9mm_fan]

It's not the Demography, it is Ineptness and Stupidity and an accute inability to integrate Muslims.

Assuming moslems want to be integrated. Seems to me like they want to integrate (infect) any host society that welcomes them, and convert them to a medieval sharia-ruled hell hole. A casual look at the UK should vindicate my point.

[PhillipHer]

Islam fast on its way to convert London into a modern day hell hole.

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0604250631.asp
April 25, 2006, 6:31 a.m.
Losing Its Religion
London assimilates.

By Erin Carden

Londonistan By Melanie Phillips (Encounter, 200 pages, $25.95)

In the sentencing phase of Zacarias Moussaoui's trial winds up in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom, Moussaoui's lawyer, Gerald Zerkin, has attempted to defend the indefensible. Zerkin has explained how Moussaoui found himself in London studying at South Bank University, where he fell in with the wrong crowd — a radical Muslim crowd — and later conspired with al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.

It's not in any way exculpatory, of course, but it's true: What Moussaoui and a number of other al Qaeda operatives have in common is London, where many of them settled and fell under the influence of radical Islamism. Londonistan, the new book by British journalist Melanie Phillips, is a gripping account of how Islamism is taking control of Britain's culture and institutions.

Phillips is critical of Britain and its refusal to address the growing problem of Islamism, which she defines as the "politicized interpretation of the religion that aims to Islamize societies." Because of this, British identity is being "eviscerated." The London bombings should have been a wake-up call to British authorities. Why, she asks, was nothing done to stop these radicals after Britain's primary ally across the Atlantic was attacked by votaries of the very same ideology? How, in short, did London become Londonistan?

Owing to an influx of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, India, and other South Asian countries in the 1970s, Islam became "Britain's second largest community of faith after Christianity." With one of the world's easiest systems of entry and asylum, Britain enabled those who wanted to disappear into it to do just that. And many of them are far from benign: According to Phillips, "up to 16,000 British Muslims either are actively engaged in or support terrorist activity, while up to 3,000 are estimated to have passed through al-Qaeda training camps . . . [and] almost a quarter of all terrorist suspects arrested in Britain since 9/11 have been asylum-seekers."

The fad of multiculturalism has further enhanced the radicals' cause. Any effort to defend the distinctness of British culture and values is thought to be an attack on minorities and multiculturalism. A "victim culture" has taken hold in Britain, whereby the minority refuses to be held accountable for its actions, claiming it is being subjugated by the majority. As a result, the majority is often the scapegoat. More often than not, the fear of Islamic terrorists is trumped by the fear of being labeled an "Islamophobe." Phillips concludes that Britain is choosing the "path of least resistance" when it should, instead, be defending itself.

This noxious mix of a radical ideology and the desire to appease rather than stop radicalization has had serious consequences. British officials failed properly to appreciate the threat the extremists posed to their country: Over a decade before the London bombings, Osama bin Laden set up shop in London, establishing an office to transmit messages from various al Qaeda cells, recruit military trainees, and distribute funds. Both Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the mastermind behind journalist Daniel Pearl's murder, hailed from Britain. Yet officials seemed completely unprepared for British al Qaeda members to come home and carry out terror attacks on their own soil.

Phillips suggests that British officials were more focused on Ireland-based terrorism than on the Middle Eastern variety: They were never given the green light to shift their attention to the rise of radical Islamism. Also, the very idea that an extremist ideology could once more take hold of a society was assumed invalid after the end of the Cold War. But one of the main reasons for Britain's inaction was the police force's embrace of the victim-culture mindset: The fear of offending a minority group and being called bigots led them to back away from some necessary confrontations.

Phillips exposes breakdowns on every level — within the British government, intelligence community, and police force — in the effort to defend Western values. A startling number of British Muslims support Islamist extremism. Londonistan gives warning that if Britain does not change its pusillanimous ways, not just its national security but its national identity will be swallowed up by the Islamists. Phillips remarks that "a nation can fight to defend itself only if it knows what it is fighting for, if it is secure in its own values"; Britain should listen to her urgent message.

— Erin Carden is assistant to the editor at National Review. She’s starting graduate work at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in the fall.

[Lt_Apple]

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as “al-Kanadi.” Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda—plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. “I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,” declared the widow Khadr. “I’m demanding my rights.”

As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he providing “aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies” but that he was, in fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to “diversity.” Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”

That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste. The Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him. Excellent piece of writing.

"Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: ''I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.''"
-- Walter Lippmann

Borrowed from Minus's post because I find it so suitable...

In addition:
Lady Kennedy was arguing that tolerance of our own tolerance is making us tolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. I left out an important typo error...