Crunching the Numbers

Channeling Mark Steyn, Arab News concedes that soon enough one in five Europeans may well be Muslim. Unlike "Cassandra" Steyn, however, the Wahhabi rag claims these mushrooming numbers bode well for all concerned:

...A sense of perspective is needed. One in five is still a minority. Islam is hardly going to become the dominant religion in Europe. Furthermore, the Islam that is practiced by European Muslims is generally perceived to be more tolerant and open than the Islam practiced in countries that are overwhelmingly Muslim.

A recent study for the Spanish government concluded that for the majority of Muslims living in Spain, religion is important to their lives but that they believe and practice a tolerant and open Islam.

Population forecasts rarely get it right. Migration ebbs and flows according to economic, political and social factors that are hard to predict. There is also the assumption that birth rates will continue to follow the same path, with Muslim women bearing more children than their non-Muslim cocitizens. All of this may not happen.

But if Muslims do end up making up one fifth of Europe’s population by 2050, this should be good news. Good news for Europe because it will have incorporated some of Islam’s richness into its already rich cultural heritage, and good news for Islam because it will feed the existence of a more tolerant and spiritual Islam that will better challenge the genuine extremist threat.

"Good news" for proponents of sharia (both the purportedly "more tolerant and spiritual" European ones and the less tolerant and more draconian Saudi Arabian ones): indubitably. "Good news" for everyone else: not so much. (Newsflash: sharia is the genuine existential threat.)