In New York, as in the Belgian parliament, you can meet more and more people who are convinced that the Islamization of Brussels – and London and other capitals, they often add – is now inevitable and only a matter of time.
The growth of the Muslim population in Brussels has been both enormous and meteoric. Over the past 50 years, the number of Muslims has grown steadily, and given the erasure of Europe’s borders, thanks to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, there seems to be no end in sight.
The figures
As many countries in Europe do not designate people by race or ethnicity, figures are not easy to establish. If we want to remain scientific and factual, it is not by noting the popularity of the first name Mohamed. The last reliable study on the number of Muslims, unfortunately, was done by Prof Jan Hertogen, dates from 2015/2016, and has been adopted by the US State Department. According to that study, the percentage of Muslims in Brussels in 2015 was 24% of the population. More recent figures have been provided by the Pew Research Center, but only for Belgium as a whole, without details by city. In another, 2016 poll, 29% of Brussels residents claimed to be Muslim. Looking at the growth curve, we can estimate that the percentage of Muslims now in Brussels is likely to be slightly beyond 30%.
These figures obviously are not evidence of a Muslim majority in Brussels – or anything near it – at least for now – although birth rates still remain higher for Muslims than for “native” Belgian women.
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Immigration
So far, Brussels is not predominantly Muslim. Immigration is not, like gravity, an immutable fact. Across Europe, with the exception of Wallonia, we are witnessing an awakening of the population and the rise to power of parties and personalities seeking zero immigration, or at least a moratorium on immigration.
Despite the claims of many that in Europe, immigration is inevitable, there may be nothing necessarily inevitable about it. What seems to have created the current chaos is the well-meaning but calamitously unthinking jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), combined with the disastrous “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”) of Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The ECHR’s extreme interpretation of “open borders” hinders the development of a workable asylum policy.
Continue here: Gatestone Institute
