In an excerpt from his new book The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, Doug Saunders demolishes the Islamophobic myth that Muslims are waging a “demographic jihad” against western civilisation.
Having analysed the declining reproduction rates among Muslim communities in Europe and North America, he concludes:
Deprived of any genuine facts suggesting an overwhelming Muslim baby boom, the more radical Muslim-tide proponents simply make them up. More than 13 million people have now viewed the YouTube video Muslim Demographics, which claims among other things that Germany will be a “Muslim state” by 2050. Every one of the video’s claims is untrue. It says that French Muslims have 8.1 children and ethnic-French families 1.8 (the figures are 2.8 and 1.9, respectively). It says that a quarter of the Belgian population is Muslim (it’s 6%), that the Netherlands will be half Muslim in 15 years (it will be 7.8% Muslim in 18 years) – and so on.
For the core claims of Muslim Demographics to be true, Muslim immigrants in the West would need to have fertility rates far above the highest ever recorded in the world. As I’ve just shown, they’re nowhere close.
See also Doug Saunders, “Three myths about Muslims that have poisoned U.S. politics”, Informed Comment, 24 July 2012