A Bit More Detail

• 80 Beats observes the discovery of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, that's the most massive star discovered to date with a mass three hundred times that of our sun.


• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, Janice Prince Inniss writes about the rising rates of intermarriage in the United States, with Asians and Hispanics marrying outside their demographic more often than whites or blacks, and some potential partners (whites, mainly) more valued than others.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley is properly scathing of a book, Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe, that's terribly sloppy in its argument that Europe is becoming Eurabia.


• Marginal Revolution quotes from a Stratfor analysis of Greece's situation that's altogether too reductionistic: Greek problems aren't all about geography, people.


• At the Search, Douglas Todd points out that rumours that Muslim birth rates in Canada are so high that soon we'll be elected Muslim prime ministers are, well, Eurabia.


• Towleroad's Andy Towle announces that after many years, the Obama administration has helped the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission to finally gain consultative status at the United Nations, along with other groups. Abroad, a coalition of mainly Muslim countries has opposed the recognition; inside the United States, some Republicans followed suit.


• Undercover Economist Tim Harford writes about the thriving--and mass popularity--of board games like Settlers of Catan in Germany.


• Window on Eurasia reports speculations that the recent ouster of the nationalist governor of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan might mean that the Russian government is finally going to place the autonomous ethnic republics more tightly under its control.

Anyone wanting to understand the situation of Muslims in Europe should visit Belleville. The rundown Parisian neighbourhood just east of the city centre is packed with couscous restaurants, Islamic bookshops and French citizens of Arab origin. About 1.5 million nominal Muslims live in the Paris region, more than in any other ­European city.

But the narrow streets of Belleville are also packed with people of ­Chinese, Jewish, sub-Saharan African and middle-class French origin. A class of children pours out of a kindergarten: toddlers of four different colours hold hands while their teachers issue commands in French.

The Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa lives in the Belleville building on whose steps, according to legend, Edith Piaf was born. (In truth, “The ­Little ­Sparrow” was born in a local hospital.) “I’m even overjoyed to go to ­McDonald’s,” says Taïa, as he pours a version of Moroccan mint tea ­reinvented by a posh French tea house. “The servers are white, black, Arab, Chinese. It’s almost too philosophical-existential an experience, to see this mélange”. On Taïa’s street, the vagrants are French, Algerian and ­Portuguese. There is a café for white creative types run by Arabs and frequented in the mornings by Chinese businessmen. By the metro around the corner, older Arab men consort with Chinese prostitutes.

A fixed trope of “Eurabia’’ books is the writer behaving as though only he or she and a few other resistance heroes see Europe’s impending doom. Bruce Bawer, a US journalist living in Oslo, credits his aunt for coming up with his title, While Europe Slept, but Melanie Phillips sees Britain as forever asleep too. “Only if we take up this civilisational gauntlet that has been thus thrown down at us will we stop sleepwalking to defeat,’’ she concludes her book. (Phillips writes for the Daily Mail, and reading Londonistan feels like being imprisoned with a never-ending Mail editorial.)

All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye’or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that “they’’ never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.

Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips’ Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the UK. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers.

[. . .]

A favourite rhetorical trick of these writers is the pars pro toto: isolated examples of Islamic extremism come to stand for a vast Muslim movement. It’s true, as Laqueur twice notes, that one group said: “We shall hoist our flags over 10 Downing Street.’’ But this is atypical. European Muslims almost all vote for mainstream parties, mostly of the left. In surveys the great majority profess satisfaction with their lives in Europe.

[. . .]

In the imagined “Eurabia’’, the Muslims are taking over. Europeans aren’t resisting. In fact, it is 1938 again, or in Bawer’s phrase, “Europe’s Weimar moment’’. A keyword of the “Eurabia’’ genre is therefore “appeasement’’ - once of Hitler, now of Muslims. Phillips urges a British-American alliance, as “when they stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany’’, with the US providing “muscle’’ and Britain “backbone’’. But unfortunately, Britain has gone wobbly. She expects this will prove fatal, because it is correct “at least in part’’ to see “Islam as a successor to Nazism and communism’’. It follows, for all four authors, that another exodus or Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is likely, though Laqueur grants that “by taking a low profile they might be able to survive in the new conditions’’.

• First, "Head count belies vision of ‘Eurabia’" takes a look at the idea of a Muslim conquest of Europe through numbers and finds it sorely lacking.

Jytte Klausen, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies European Muslims, says: “It’s being advocated by people who don’t consult the numbers. All these claims are really emotional claims.” Sometimes they are made by Muslim or far-right groups, who share an interest in exaggerating the numbers.

Nominal Muslims – whether religious or not – account for 3-4 per cent of the European Union’s total population of 493m. Their percentage should rise, but far more modestly than the extreme predictions. That is chiefly because Muslims, both in Europe and the main “emigrating countries” of Turkey and north Africa, are having fewer babies.

“Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe,” says Ms Klausen. Few European states ask citizens about religious beliefs. Estimates based on national origins suggest that 16m nominal Muslims live in the EU. There are about 5m in France, 3.3m in Germany and 1.5m-2m in the UK.

“Berlin is a Muslim city, Paris is a Muslim city, and even Madrid or Turin to some degree,” Jocelyn Cesari, an expert on European Muslims at Harvard University, has said.

The EU’s most Islamic country is Bulgaria, where 1m Muslims account for about one-seventh of the population.

But the birth-rates of Europe’s Muslim immigrants, though still above the EU’s average, are falling. The fertility rate of north African women in France has been dropping since 1981, say Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse in their book Integrating Islam. “The longer immigrant women live in France, the fewer children they have; their fertility rate approaches that of native-born French women.”

At the last count Algerian women living in France averaged an estimated 2.57 children, against 1.94 for French women overall.

The decline in birth-rates is more dramatic in north Africa itself. Women there use contraceptives more and have babies later than they did. In Algeria and Morocco 35 years ago, the average woman had seven children. According to the United Nations, it is now 2.5 in Algeria (about the same as Turkey), 2.8 in Morocco, and falling in all of them. The US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook has even lower estimates of Algerian, Tunisian and Turkish birth-rates: below France’s rate and below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Emigrating countries are no longer exporting high birth rates to Europe.

• Second, "Religious fault line divides Europeans" provides finer detail on attitudes in different European countries towards Islam and religion generally, as well as towards individual Muslims.

An overwhelming majority of French people regard Muslim immigrants as French, see them as suitable marriage partners for children and do not consider them threats to security. This may seem surprising less than two years after the riots in French suburbs and three years after France banned Muslim headscarves from schools.

But Patrick Simon, a demographer at Ined demographic institute in Paris, said the riots of November 2005 had not been Islamist revolts against France. Rather, the main grievances were economic and against the police. “There was a social motor, not a religious motor,” he said.

Fewer than a quarter of Spaniards saw the presence of Muslims as a threat to national security or thought Muslims had too much political power. Only a fifth said they would object to their child marrying a Muslim.

The US prides itself on integrating immigrants more successfully than European countries. However, 40 per cent of Americans with children said they would object to their children marrying Muslims. Mr Bleich suggested this might be because more Americans than Europeans belonged to churches. “If you asked someone in an evangelical church, ‘Would you object if your child married a Catholic?’ you might get quite high numbers too.”

A third of Italians and Germans, and 46 per cent of Britons felt Muslims had too much political power. Of the British figure, Mr Bleich said: “That radically over- estimates the amount of power Muslims have.” Only four of 646 members of parliament are Muslims, and Muslims had failed to change Britain’s Iraq policy.

The poll’s methodology weighted the sample for factors such as age and gender but not for religious belief, and the number of self-declared Muslim respondents appears low. In France, Muslims are thought to represent 8-9 per cent of the population. In Germany and the UK, the figure is closer to 3-4 per cent. But self-declared Muslims represented only 1 per cent of the respondents in these three countries.