I recently was presented with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU – which tries to scare Christians into having more babies to avoid an “impending Muslim takeover of the world”. To most rational people, this reeks of scare tactics and pandering to base instincts and emotions. However, a number of people have taken up the cause proposed in this video, leading to the necessity to refute it (which really shouldn’t be necessary)…
So here is a pretty quick response to the absurd claims (and falsified “facts”) put forth in the video.
Stands to reason? Not quite. I’d say that no “reason” was applied to the making of this video. This video would fail the most introductory college-level (and likely high school) statistics, logic, or civics classes.
Very telling that this video repeatedly cites a book (that I can not find a record of online) instead of the Census bureau (census.gov), the UN statistics center (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/default.htm), the European Union Statistics offices, or the CDC/NCHS’s birthrates charts (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/births.htm).
The US Census and Center For Immigration Studies says that there were approx. 3 million Muslims in 2002 and a US population of 300,000,000 (300,900,000 estimated as of May 10th, 2009 – census.gov). That’s 1% (census.gov // http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back802.html). The US Census also states that the Hispanic population is the largest/fastest growing minority in the country (minority until at least 2100 if not for a long time after). So not only would the Hispanic growth rate have to practically stop, but the Muslim (seriously, comparing a religion’s growth/birthrate to an ethnic group is unsound but the video tried it so I mention it here) birthrate would have to drastically skyrocket at a rate surpassing what this video purports and a rate larger than has been seen in all of human history – while all other populations experience an unprecedented decrease. That would be adding 147,000,000 people – in one country - in 40 years (and not taking into account the rest of the country’s population growth). Not. Happening.
Also in regards to the above, the obvious implication is that Muslim = non-white of Arabic/Asian descent. When talking about Europe, it’s not even implied, it’s straight up about it (see section on immigration and Turkey). The Census Bureau’s projections for 2050 (http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/usinterimproj/) do not add up to this being possible without almost every non-white and non-hispanic person in the country being Muslim, again necessitating an almost complete decimation of Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism/Agnosticism, indigenous religions, etc. Actually, you would need every single black person to convert as well, and you’d just then end up around 150 million Muslims. Any knowledge of traditional southern black churches alone will throw this notion out the window.
This stated “fact” of a culture not being able to “survive” is unverified as well as flies against common sense – if this were true we would not have Aboriginal populations/culture in Australia, the Persian Jews of Iran, traditional Balinese culture (on which I can furnish you a 10+ page research paper I wrote) in primarily Muslim Indonesia, etc. They all would have been “bred out of existence”. There are still adherents to Zorastrianism (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/zoroastrian/) – a religion dating from far before any of the Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) – absolutely impossible under the “facts” stated by the video.
Additionally, the video posits that there is “one global christian culture” which is easily demonstrably false – do you live with the same rites, rituals, lifestyles, and beliefs as Mormons living in Provo Utah? No. Do you observe the same ceremonies and rituals as Roman Catholics in Italy? No. What about Eastern Orthodox Catholics in Moscow? Nope. Pentecostal snake handlers in Georgia? No. The “God Hates Fags” lunatics from the Westboro Baptist Church? Absolutely not. To counter the typical statement of “We don’t live the same but believe in the same God, but the Muslims don’t!” read up on Abrahamic religions – all three have the same God (Yahweh, Jehovah, etc.)
Really, a quick lookup of many of the statistics reported in this video shows no results. For something so factual, why can’t anything be found so this can be verified? Because it’s largely nonsense. Give it a try. While questioning the veracity of the statistics, the nature of the video uploader should be questioned as well – it obviously speaks with an American Christian voice and cultural tone, but was uploaded by “friendofmuslim” who is supposedly from Lebanon with all video comments turned off? Red flag to anyone familiar with internet trolling/misleading internet posting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll). It also has no organizational title or claim on it further obscuring fact checking on who made it, what their qualifications are, where they got their information from, and what their goal is from making this.
Additionally, the quote attributed to the German government – a quick Google search shows no such statement, which would have certainly been reported ad nauseum by the same people this video is focused towards. In fact, the only sources that can found for this (supposedly by the Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland) are all quoting the video. No search in English or German shows anything corraborating this statement in any HTML documents nor in any press releases.
The Brussels Journal is a conservative website/blog and _not_ an official Government statistics/government entity as the video clearly states. This site has also seen numerous complaints by the Belgian government of provoking racism, including the 2006 murders allegedly perpetrated by Hans van Thernsche.
“In 7 years Islam will be the dominant religion in the world” – someone forgot to tell the approx 1,333,355,150 (and growing) Chinese this (http://www.cpirc.org.cn/en/eindex.htm), who has an approximately 1%-2% muslim population just like the US (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html#People). An equally improbable growth (or conversion/die-off of non Muslims) would need to transpire in China at the same time as Europe and the United States. Simple intuition raises red flags (normal red flags or pseudo-communist red flags, take your pick) all over this notion. Also telling that they didn’t bother trying to cite any of the studies that they mention when quoting this statistic. Remember, 92.1% of statistics are made up on the spot.
And besides, 2050 is NOT in 7 years!!!!
The oh-so-scary “8.1″ birthrate of Turkey that is going to help fuel the destruction of Europe – According to the CIA’s Factbook, the Turkish Birthrate is 16.1 per 1000 people. That definitely does not compute to 8.1 per person as the video claims. Not too scary when you also look up that Israel (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/is.html – you can look up the others), Peru, Columbia, Panama and many other places have higher birthrates. The US has an overall birthrate of 14.2 per 1000 – not quite enough to get the quick 40 year roll over that the video predicts. Also evidenced by the CIA’s factbook is that the Christian nations in Africa have the highest birthrates in the world (again, easily found).
The Canadian statistics – apparently sourced from “Is Canada’s economy a model for America” – a speech by Mark Steyn, who again (like the Brussels Journal) been accused on multiple occasions of stoking racist fires (though to be fair, his 2008 Canadian Human Rights Commission case was dismissed). Regardless, his “Is Canada’s economy…” contained no reliable, verifiable stats on it’s own and was presented as pure opinion – not something to quote as a definitive source (http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=01).
The “scary” phrasing of “The world that we live in is not the one that our children or grandchildren will grow up in” – absolutely true – but it’s been true for 1000s of years. Spain was once controlled by Muslims before, then Christians again, then had a chance in the 1930s of being an Atheist, Anarchist collective on a large scale before the Communists and Fascists under Franco teamed up and then the Fascists murdered everyone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_del_Trabajo) – leading back to a current Christian majority after the wars. Constant change – it has and will be the one true law of humanity, if not life as a whole in a more general sense.
Like I said, this is fear-mongering “Glenn Beck-ish” conspiracy nonsense (Actually, this is more parallel to some David Duke writings from the year or so after 9/11). Making rash belief statements, especially based on easily debunked YouTube videos that fall victim to a range of logical (Appeal to inappropriate authority, Appeal to belief, Appeal to Emotion, Burden of Proof, etc. ) and statistical fallacies is not a good idea.
More links in regards to this:
http://tinyfrog.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/muslim-demographics/ (more debunking/charts/stats/sources)
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/eurostat/home (EU statistics bureau)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ (CIA World FactBook)
p.s. A doctoral candidate friend of mine wrote this up as well:
In short the video surmises that “There is a singular ‘culture’ of Christendom, shared equally by the U.S., Canada, the EU, and Russia. In these places, due to immigration and widely discrepant fertility rates, Muslims are overwhelming these populations and, thus, changing their ‘culture,’ presumably to a singularly Islamic ‘culture.’” The problem, of course, is that:
1) The “historical research,” which isn’t cited, that supposed that a “culture” can’t survive with a fertility rate lower than 2.11 is ridiculous. What does survival even mean? The premise here is that if a country were to become majority Muslim, the Christians would disappear? Would relinquish their power? Convert? In most of these nations, Christianity is hemorrhaging people all by itself.
2) Of course, these countries are not uniformly Christian and, to the extent to which they are mostly Christian now (and a lot of them are not), they are not Christian in the same way. The Eastern Orthodox Christianity of some Russians is very different from the Mormonism in parts of the U.S. and the Catholicism widely practiced by Latin Americans in the US (get to them later). The vast religious differences aside, the notion that Moscow, Provo, Paris, and Miami are linked by a singular culture is preposterous. A Russian Muslim might well have a lot more in common culturally, religiously even, with a Russian Christian than with some snakehandler in Alabama.
3) The funny part of this whole thing is that ALL Latin American immigration – since they are Christians and all – by this reductive reasoning, should be encouraged. So it’s nice to see that the former subtext of a race war has given way to a religious one. But… the race one made more sense! At least then it was about something that’s actually, really happening (Latinos becoming the majority of the US population) rather than some makebelieve nonsense.
