Readers keep asking what I make of that Newsweek story I mentioned yesterday — the one that accuses me and others who say that Europe is Islamizing fast of piling “speculation upon speculation.”
But I don’t think there’s really anything to reply to that I haven’t replied to a hundred times before. The key to the author’s nothing-to-see-here thesis comes at the foot of page one:
Fertility rates remain higher among Muslim immigrants than among other Europeans, and Muslims may continue to arrive in Europe in large numbers. But the alarmists assume that past patterns are sure to hold. “The worst of the scaremongering is based on the assumption that current behavior will continue,” says Grace Davie, an expert on Europe and Islam at the University of Exeter in Britain.
So a trend predicated upon current behavior is “speculation upon speculation,” but a belief (stated without supporting evidence) that current behavior will change the way you think it will is far more scientific and rational?
The Newsweek piece falls into the same wishing-will-make-it-so category as this British news story:
POLICE will be ordered not to charge Muslim extremists in many hate crime cases – to stop them becoming more militant.