Breeding Out the Infidels

With the western world shifting from a primarily Judeo-Christian mindset to the more secular, we've seen birth rates drop dramatically in industrialized democracies for quite some time. In the past Catholicism spread and sustained itself by couples having four, five or seven kids. Other Christian denominations urged procreation to spread the word.

In the early 21st Century, we've changed that mindset. Liberalized thinking and liberalism in general changed the way we look at having children. It's now OK not to have kids and to say so. This is a dramatic reversal from thinking just thirty or forty years ago.

Other factors such as abortion on demand have decreased the populations overall. Westernized nations have seen birth rates drop to numbers that will greatly effect the social programs that rely on young working people for sustenance.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Muslim world has been procreating at a quick rate and will exceed the one billion people that conservative estimates believe follow that faith today.

Mark Steyn looks at this phenomenon and writes this:

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

Of course, read the entire piece in the WSJ, it's brilliant.