The January 2011 edition of National Geographic Magazine contains a cover story by Robert Kunzig, titled, “Population 7 Billion.” If it is not enough to scare the pants off anyone concerned about the future of mankind, it should at least be enough to make us do some serious thinking. For example, what do we see as the long term future of the country where our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren, will have to live long after we are gone?
The article begins by describing how, in 1677, Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek attempted to estimate the population of the Earth. Since there were no reliable censuses, van Leeuwenhoek assumed that the Earth was as densely populated as Holland. And since the population of Holland was estimated to be about 1 million people, and the inhabitable land mass of the Earth was estimated to be some 13,385 times the size of Holland (the correct figure is close to 3,300 times the size of Holland), he concluded that there were some 13.4 billion people on Earth.
Actually, he overestimated a bit. Anthropologists now estimate that, in 1677, the population of the Earth was only about 500 million. As Kunzig describes the post-1677 population growth, “A century and a half later… the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion. A century after that, around 1930, it had doubled again to two billion. Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us.” UN demographers project world population at nine billion by 2045.
Kunzig tells us that, “Close to a billion people go hungry each day,” and that, “Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries…” Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted in 1970 that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and that it was far too late to do anything about it. Making the point that the very future of the United States was at stake, he said, “The cancer of population growth… must be cut out, by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
What has surprised demographers is how far and how fast fertility rates have fallen in some areas of the world. Kunzig points out that, “China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having 1.5…” But there is another very ominous side to the story. Kunzig tells us that in some parts of the world, occupied by just 16 percent of the world population, there is still a problem of high fertility… mostly in sub-Saharan Africa where fertility rates average five children per woman.
Compared to fertility rates in most western nations… 2.1 children per woman in the United States, 1.9 in New Zealand, 1.5 in Canada, 1.3 in Germany and Austria, 1.2 in Russia and Italy, and 1.1 in Spain… it is worrisome to compare birthrates in those countries with the fertility rate in some Muslims countries: Niger 7.46, Mali 7.42, Somalia 6.76, Afghanistan 6.69, and Yemen 6.58. As those countries continue to overpopulate and their people become poorer and hungrier, they tend to want to emigrate to Europe and to the United States where, more and more, they are making up the shortfall in the population replacement rate.
Joseph D’Agostino of the Population Research Institute states the obvious. He says, “For the most part, only Muslims have high birth rates…” And since Christians and Jews are no longer having large families, “Muslims are going to inherit the Earth.” He warns that the world will be a far different place if Muslims become the dominant religious group. He says, “I think we can see what life is like in Islamic countries… And we can see that the Muslim world is becoming actually more radical and, in many ways, is headed backwards into its barbaric phase…”
In some European countries Muslims have already begun to overwhelm existing cultures. They are imposing Sharia Law on old Europe at a rapid pace and, unless the people of Western Europe wake up and turn things around, within a generation or two the Europe we know and love will be gone forever. Unlike other cultures, Muslims do not assimilate. To the contrary, their goal is to overwhelm the culture of their host countries. We’ve seen this in the installation of foot baths at airports, Muslim cab drivers refusing to transport passengers with alcohol in their luggage, Muslim clerks refusing to ring up alcohol at department store cash registers, etc., etc.
Again, what we must all decide, before it’s too late, is what sort of country we want to leave to our children and grandchildren… assuming, of course, that we care enough that we would want to leave them a nation with a western-style culture that bears no resemblance to the barbaric 7th and 8th century cultures that dominate the Muslim world in the 21st century.
Americans have always taken pride in the fact that we were an ethnic “melting pot.” But that characterization ceased to be a source of pride when immigration quotas favoring Europeans were abandoned in 1965. The catalyst for that demographic disaster was Senator Ted Kennedy’s Immigration and Nationality Act. Since implementation of the Kennedy bill the United States has experienced a flood of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. What he and other liberals failed to understand is that we had a perfectly fine country before they came along and that the vast majority of us would have preferred it to stay just as it was.
What Western nations must ultimately conclude is that Islam is not a “religion” as we in the west understand the term. Vested with full 1st Amendment rights, it is far more than that; it is a social, political, legal, military, and economic system with a spiritual component. It is an evil force that attempts to impose its seventh century value system in any way possible, violent or non-violent, on an enlightened twenty-first century world. Without its religious component, Islam would be viewed as just another hate group, outlawed in every country outside the Islamic world. Of all of the major religious denominations, it is only Muslims who proselytize by giving reluctant converts a choice they cannot refuse: either swear allegiance to the Prophet Mohammed, or die.
Some Western European nations are already beginning to push back. Several European leaders have declared multiculturalism a failure. France has enacted a law barring Muslim women from wearing the burka in public and Germany and Holland are considering similar laws. But much more needs to be done.
Like most Europeans of the post-World War II era, many Americans have succumbed to the fiction that Islam is a “religion of peace” and that worldwide jihad is merely a pipedream of the radical few. The litmus test for Islam as a “religion of peace” will be the day when churches and synagogues can be built throughout the Muslim world and when Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims can practice their religious beliefs openly and freely in all Muslim countries… and not before. Since many mosques are known to be breeding grounds for jihadist murderers, Muslims should be prohibited from building mosques anywhere in the West.
Islam must be viewed, not as the world’s second largest religious denomination, but as an invasive alien culture that has not evolved appreciably beyond its 7th century roots.
If Islam cannot be banned from our shores on the basis that it is far more than just another religious sect seeking religious freedom… that it is, in fact, an invading force that occupies and holds territory by terrorizing and out-populating the indigenous peoples… then T.B Macaulay was right when, in 1859, he characterized the U.S. Constitution as being “all sail and no anchor.” Instead, we must acknowledge that our Constitution invites such liberalization of 1st Amendment principles as to be a self-destructing instrument. If it does not allow us to protect ourselves from a religious sect that seeks not religious freedom, but social and political dominion through violent means, then it will not allow us to protect ourselves from the drunken savagery of a rampaging motorcycle gang. It’s all a matter of scale.
Kunzig’s study leaves us with just two options. If we do not want to see our major cities devolve into nightmarish Muslim hellholes such as Kabul, Baghdad, or worse, Mogadishu, we can; a) do nothing, insuring that the U.S will become just another Islamic cesspool, our women brutalized and disenfranchised, or b) we can maintain the current size and ethnicity of the U.S. population by repealing the Immigration and Nationality Act, returning to pre-Kennedy immigration quotas, giving preference to the wealthiest, best educated, and most productive people of Europe, South America, and the Far East, and reducing or eliminating our dependence on Arab oil. That must be our goal and we must not shrink from embracing it openly and publicly.
Caroline Glick writes in Jewish World Review that, since taking office, Barack Obama has “failed to conceive of a strategy for contending with the situation.” Instead, he has discouraged any discussion of the basic threat posed by radical Islam by banning the use of the terms “War on Terror,” “jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” and “Radical Islam” in U.S. government documents.
As one Muslim caller to a radio talk show put it, “The liberal (peace-loving) Muslims are on the bus… but the crazies are driving the bus.” If that is the same bus on which Obama has invited Republicans to ride… so long as we sit in the back… then I want no part of it. It’s time to get all of the good people off the bus, turn it around, put Obama behind the wheel, and send him and all of his Muslim friends back to where they came from. Call me islamophobic if you will, but if peace-loving Muslims are incapable of controlling their radicalized brethren and assimilating in our culture, then I just don’t want them in my country.