Misleading breeding stats are the new skull-measurement

[imomus]

There are few things more annoying than that breed of American right-winger who tells us -- at every opportunity -- that Europe is about to become a Muslim state. It's a meme circulated in right wing circles in Europe too -- in the idea of Eurabia, for instance, or in the book Londonistan by right wing pundit Melanie Phillips. These people have in common that they take Europe's current state of ethnic and religious pluralism and project it into a future where it becomes, suddenly, its opposite. Where one group -- the Muslims -- takes over, turning diversity into monoculture: a European muslim superstate. There's only one problem. The figures just don't add up.

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This argument is based on demographic statistics. "They" are breeding faster than "us", or immigrating and failing to integrate with "our" values, and therefore becoming a "state within a state". (Odd that Americans, who built their 20th-century pre-eminence on immigration, are so reluctant to see it happen elsewhere.) But -- as the BBC's statistics programme More or Less valuably showed this weekend -- the statistics used to create a sense of panic about Europe's racial and religious diversity are simply wrong. Here's the BBC's fact check on the Muslim Demographics video above:

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The really puzzling thing, for me, is how an argument so much posited on the fact of there being a "stark choice" between conflicting systems ends up taking so many of its cues from "the enemy". The blurb for the Muslim Demographics video, for instance, says "Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims." The message is that we must live as they live, otherwise we will be forced to live as they live.

A similar "let's copy the Muslims" philosophy comes through in the documentary Jesus Camp. Here's the trailer:

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Again, it's basically "let's be like them before they rise up and force us to be like them". The "them" is a reductive stereotype. As one of the trainers in the Jesus Camp doc puts it: "Where should we put our focus? I'll tell you where our enemies are putting it. They're putting it on the kids. You go to Palestine and they're taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps and they're putting hand grenades in their hands." A few seconds later we're seeing teachers in a Bible camp asking children: "How many want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?" A child's voice says "We're being trained to be those who'd be God's army." Hey, let's avoid falling under the yoke of Islamist terrorists by becoming something even worse!



The theory behind the Eurabia argument is as wrong as the statistics it's based on, and the praxis is illogical -- be like them so that we don't have to be like them. As a European who adores the strong and healthy Muslim presence here in Europe (and who even married, at one point, into a Muslim family), I'd like to advise these American right-wingers to cultiver their own jardin. You know, that superstate built on immigration and the idea that, wherever you came from, you're an American when you get to America. It's the same here: whoever is in Europe is a European by definition.

Resisting the Eurabians will be difficult, but ultimately I am optimistic. Sure, the Muslim Demographics video has had over ten million YouTube views and the BBC correction has had -- at the time of writing -- only 40. But growth rates on the BBC video are healthy. It is reproducing strongly. I believe that by 2050 the BBC vid will overtake and overwhelm the viewership -- and ethos -- of the Muslim Demographics film and rule it with a fist of iron. Well, a calculator of stainless steel, anyway.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, Click Opera has regular commenters, based in the US, who promote these views, though they're otherwise jolly decent chaps.

I did, though, also cite Melanie Phillips, the columnist for UK papers The Daily Mail and The Guardian, and her book Londonistan.

A muslim of which nationality?

[(Anonymous)]

You adore Muslims? Surely you could be a little more specific. In Berlin - I lived there for quite a while - I had Turkish friends and had reason to say 'these Muslims are a misrepresented bunch' at one or another time, but since moving to the south of France, where there are far fewer Turks and many more north Africans, I've been disappointed by the behaviour of Muslims in the street and worry about it frankly. I know Marseille well, Lyon too, and more than these two, Paris. Who do you think has had more success in integrating Muslim immigrants? The Germans, right? But only because they admitted Turks? I was interested to read some time ago in your blog that in Berlin, Turks and North Africans do not get along well.

Re: A muslim of which nationality?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I've lived in three European cities with very different muslim populations. In London I liked the Bangladeshis enough to marry one. In Paris I gravitated more to the Vietnamese quarter and had occasional street aggro problems with the Algerians and Moroccans. In Berlin I've found the Turkish areas of the city by far the most pleasant, and become almost "patriotic" about Neukolln's Turkish culture. Yes, some gang violence happened a couple of years ago between Turks and North Africans in Neukolln schools. It's my understanding that that's now simmered down.

But I take your point that broad-brush generalisations -- seeing a religious-cultural bloc that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia as a single entity -- are fairly foolish.

[(Anonymous)]

i wonder if Melanie Philips had some kind of road to damascus style revelation at some point. As far as I remember when she wrote for the Guardian, she was perfectly in tune with the (1980s?) Guardian agenda, then recently, suddenly she appeared all over various media sounding like someone she might well have despised in the 1980s.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's been known to happen in the UK media, hasn't it? The papers on the right have more money and bigger circulations. Phillips still writes for The Guardian, presumably to provide some pro-Israeli ballast from time to time.

Actually, I started thinking about her yesterday when watching an old VHS tape from my stash, a discussion about film censorship from 1993. She was already, by that point, on the right, pushing a "ban the video nasties" line and staring in withering contempt at the bearded libertarian across the table. As far as she was concerned, science had proved that watching violence makes you more violent.

She's married to Joshua Rozenberg, who used to be the BBC's law correspondent but now writes for the Daily Telegraph, so has also presumably drifted right.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's a fascinating history to be written by someone about the exact moment when the people who were students in 1968 became conservatives, and why. I personally think the period of 1988 to 1992 saw the flip, due to a combination of the PC thing and the fall of communism. And perhaps also just sheer exhaustion fighting Thatcher-Reagan, and the desire to make money and get on. New Labour began to happen at around the same time. And, with communism gone, it was conservative Islam that took the full force (and God, was it force!) of the neo-liberals' "humanitarian interventions". Because conservative Islam is conservative, these 68ers could continue to think of themselves as, in some vague way, "liberals" (military invasions in the name of women's rights, and so on).

[(Anonymous)]

The tipping point for the literary wing of the right-turning '68s (Amis, McEwen, Hitchens et al.) was probably 1989 and the Rushdie fatwa.