Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Fear-mongering about Islam? Who? Walt?

Sunday's post "'Belgistan' - a vision of our future" brought a scathing comment (via Agent 17) from a gentleman who resides in, errr, Belgium. The CBN video, the gentleman says, is bovine excrement, at least as regards the numbers of Muslims in "Belgistan".

Walt has never found CBN any less accurate than, say, Fox News, so didn't ask Ed. to do a fact check. For the record, what I heard was that Muslims represent about 25% of the population of Brussels, and a smaller minority nation-wide. Whether they are 49%, 4.9% or 0.49% of Belgium's population seems to me beside the point. The point is this. Given that Muslims are breeding like little fez-wearing rabbits, and Christian Belgians aren't managing even the replacement rate, the Muslims will eventually be the majority.

Just by coincidence, the same point was made at the Vatican on Saturday, when Peter Cardinal Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, showed the Synod of Bishops a video that Vatican Radio described as a "fear-mongering presentation of statistics attempting to show how Islam is conquering Europe and the rest of the world".

The video emphasized the high birth rates among Muslims in Europe, in contrast with the falling fertility of native Europeans, and concluded that the continent would soon be predominantly Islamic. Was it the same video as the one referred to here? As the Synod meets in camera, we don't know. Was the point the same? Definitely!

Catholic World News quotes Vatican Radio as saying, "Why one of the Curial cardinals chose to show this piece of anti-Islamic propaganda is quite unclear." But, it said, the dramatic presentation did give rise to some energetic discussions, with some bishops criticizing the video while others chose to emphasize the need for more effective evangelization among the people of formerly Christian Europe.

Footnote: Cardinal Turkson is Ghanaian, so let's hold fire, please, on the usual charges of Catholic European racism.

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