Falling Muslim Birthrates May Delay That Muslim Conquest Of The West

In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened.
Director of the UN Population Division Hania Zlotnik, quoted by Ettinger

Yoram Ettinger, who often writes about the decline in Palestinian fertility and the underestimated growth in the fertility of Israelis, writes that there is a actually a decline in fertility across the Muslim world:

The Arab fertility rate in Judea and Samaria is declining at an accelerated pace as a result of modernity: urbanization (70 percent rural in 1967 vs. 75% urban in 2012), increased education, especially among women (most of whom complete high school and increasingly attend community colleges), enhanced career mentality and growing integration into the workforce among women (reproduction starts later and ends earlier), all-time high median wedding age and divorce rate, minimal teen pregnancy (common in 1967 but rare in 2012), family planning and secularization.

David Goldman (“Spengler”) writes in his book How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) that “as Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe’s low fertility. … Iranian women in their 20s, who grew up with five or six siblings, will bear only one or two children during their lifetimes. ... By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe."

Goldman writes that while world fertility has fallen from about 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5, the fertility rate in the Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster than the world average. The Muslim world has reached the point that university-educated Muslim women are now bearing children at the same rate as their European counterparts. Thus, the only Muslim countries where women are still giving birth to 7 to 8 children are in the ones which are poorest and least literate -- Mali, Niger, Somalia and Afghanistan.

This is a far cry from the Muslim extremists who brag--and those in the West who wring their hands at the thought--of the coming conquest of the West by Muslims simply by virtue of their growing numbers.

According to Goldman, the only advanced country other than the US to be maintaining a high fertility rate besides the US is Israel, leading to his prediction that

Israel will have more young people than Italy or Spain, and as many as Germany, by the end of the century, if fertility remains unchanged. A century and a half after the Holocaust, the Jewish State will have more military-age men, and will be able to field a larger land army, than Germany.

Those who take pleasure in lecturing Israel about its need to make unilateral concessions because of the all-powerful fertility rate of the Arab world need to start paying attention.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Fertility.