“I fear we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of Christianity in Northern Africa in Islam’s early days”, a Lutheran bishop, Jobst Schoene, warned a few years ago.

In ancient times, Algeria and Tunisia, entirely Christian, gave us great thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. Two centuries later, Christianity has disappeared, replaced by Arab-Islamic civilization.

Is Europe now meeting the same fate?

In the Middle East, “Christianity is over in Iraq” due to Islamic extremism; in Europe, Christianity is committing suicide.

Within 20 years, more babies will be born to Muslim women than to Christian women world-wide; it is just the latest sign of the rapid growth that seems to be making Islam the world’s largest religion by the end of the century, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center.

“Christianity is literally dying in Europe,” said Conrad Hackett, the head of the researchers who worked on the Pew report.

According to it, between 2010 and 2015, the Muslim population increased by more than 150 million people to 1.8 billion.

In Europe, how many Christians have been “lost”? Between 2010 and 2015, “deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million during this brief period”.

At this pace, Christianity will vanish in Europe.

In the same time frame, in most European countries — including Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia — Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births. “In Germany alone, for example, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births between 2010 and 2015, a pattern that is expected to continue across much of Europe in the decades ahead”, Pew discovered. There are clear patterns of demographic trends, church attendance, closures of parishes and the declining number of priests.

These patterns are why Islamic leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been waging a demographic war against Europe. “Have not just three but five children”, Erdogan said to Muslims in the old continent. “You are the future of Europe”. This plan is called, in Islam, hijrah: expanding Islam by migration, based on Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622.

Christianity in Northern Europe has already been weakened by atheism, a trend possibly accelerated by modern gains in science and medicine. The American sociologist Phil Zuckerman, after spending more than a year in Scandinavia, published a book, Society Without God. Recently, after a nationwide advertising campaign by the Atheist Society thousands of people left the Church of Denmark. Norway’s state church lost more than 25,000 members in a month. Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

Christianity is also collapsing in the UK. Across Greater Manchester, 20 churches will soon close. According to some reports, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain by 2033. The Catholic Church’s Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh is planning to cut the number of parishes from more than 100 to 30. The Archdiocese of Glasgow, by far the country’s largest, will soon — within two decades — have only 45 priests and probably shut down half its parishes. Imagine, a huge Catholic community will close half its churches.

The Catholic Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, headed by Archbishop Leo Cushley (right), is planning to cut the number of parishes from more than 100 to 30. (Image source: Lawrence OP/Flickr)

Catholics in the Netherlands are also embracing a “future without churches“. Cardinal Willem Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, announced that by 2025 about a thousand Catholic parishes would close. “We predict that a third of Catholic churches will be closed by 2020 and two-thirds by 2025”, he said.

Most churches in Brussels will be also closed– 108 of them. Vienna Archdiocese in Austria will also liquidate most of its parishes — 660 of them — in the next 10 years. Instead, the Archdiocese will merge them into 150 larger parishes.

One finds similar numbers everywhere in Europe, from Catholic Spain to the Protestant United Kingdom.

Father Benedict Kiely, a Catholic priest who founded nasarean.org, which helps persecuted Christians in the Middle East, recently met some Christians persecuted by ISIS in Iraq. As he left the country, another elderly priest, himself a refugee, gripped Kiely’s hand and told him in Arabic: “Be careful, be very careful. What has happened here will come to you”.

As the attacks against two Coptic Christian churches in Egypt on Palm Sunday reminds us, the war of extermination being waged against Christians in the Middle East is very real indeed.

Canadian philosopher Mathieu Bock-Côté writes in Le Figaro:

“The Western world has long gotten used to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, as if their bad lot is inevitable and has to simply be accepted. Shouldn’t the issue of Middle Eastern Christians wake up European civilization to its core identity? Shouldn’t we in Europe and the West be telling ourselves that these attacks are also aimed at us?”

Europe has, for some time, been experiencing this war against Christianity on its own soil: the terror attack at a French church in Normandy, in which Islamic extremists murdered a priest before the altar; the terror plot against the Cathedral of Notre Dame; the threat by ISIS to turn Saint Peter’s Cathedral into a mosque; the deadly terror attack at a Christmas market in Berlin, to name just a few of them.

“The mother tongue of Europe is Christianity”, said the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — not a Pope. Maybe that language will again be strong in the future. Maybe priests will keep Christianity alive in London, Brussels and Paris. Maybe. But that is not what happened in North Africa.

By now, Goethe’s “mother tongue” has, in Europe, been reduced to a barely-discernible whisper. Instead, one can hear, instead, the “Islamic tongue” getting stronger every year.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

It has been said that when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the reconstitution of the military in 1955, he proclaimed: “It is crazy, gentlemen, that I have to create a German army, it is just crazy”.

Sixty years have passed, but that sentiment still seems very strong in Germany. A few days ago Sigmar Gabriel, the German foreign minister, said: “We have to be a bit careful here that we don’t over-interpret the 2 percent target.” Gabriel then became clearer: “Maintain perspective, stay focused on the target, but avoid being consumed by the bliss of a new rearmament spiral!”

A few days earlier, Germany had made an announcement: to raise the number of soldiers from 170,000 to 198,000 by 2024 — a modest “rearmament”.

It is a direct consequence of the Trump Administration’s important pressure on European allies, urging them to invest more in defense and security. European armies have become, to quote The Economist, “Potemkin Euro-armies“. Germany’s views are crucial to understanding Europe’s attitude about security and defense. Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy and Europe’s financial giant, is a military dwarf, proud of being weak and disarmed.

Take the countries which suffered most of terror attacks in the last two years. Belgium? It spends 0.85% of its gross domestic product on defense. France? 1.78%. Germany? 1.19%. Spain, which in 2004 experienced the most severe attack in Europe’s recent history? 0.94%.

Europe is enjoying a big siesta. It is disarmed not only militarly but also mentally. Seventy-five percent of Belgium’s military spending goes to pay army pensions. As NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson put it, “The problem in Europe is that there are far too many people in uniform, and too few of them able to go into action.”

Another NATO official, Joseph Ralston, the former supreme commander for Europe, defined European armies as “fat and redundant”.

These countries have all embraced the moral vanity of pacifism.

Thanks to it, Germany’s military supply depots are now almost completely empty, according to the newspaper, Die Welt. Possibly fearing a “rearmament spiral”, Germany in fact ended up with a shy army with no drums.

The German population is unwilling to defend itself. A survey by the research firm TNS Emnid showed that 73% of the Germans remain opposed to higher military spending by NATO countries. Manfred Güllner, head of the Berlin-based pollster, Forsa, said that many Germans “would rather have the military not be operational and stay at home”. For most Germans, “history is over“. After the reunification of the country, they seem to mean, they have no more enemies or threats; only friends and opportunities to build a better world, all together. According with Der Spiegel, “Germany is experiencing a relapse into pacifism”.

Born in the years of a Cold War that could become hot, the Bundeswehr, the German army, was the backbone of NATO forces. Today, it is Europe’s military soft underbelly. In contrast to its European neighbors (Belgium, Denmark, France and the Netherlands), Germany refused to deploy its military jets to attack Islamic State positions in Iraq. When, last September, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen visited Iraq to talk to the German officers training Kurdish fighters, she assured her troops that they would not be close to the battle zones. She added that for the German army, “Security is the highest priority”.

John Vinocur wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Germany, one of the largest manufacturers of weapons in the world, has made it clear again that even facing a barbaric enemy, such as ISIS, it is a non-lethal actor. “Diplomats in uniform” is how German soldiers have been called. In Germany, sending fighting troops abroad looks unthinkable today.

The military no longer figures in the German public’s consciousness. If a German chief of staff can be pressured to resign after a raid in Afghanistan did not go as well as planned, it means that he did not have the backing of his society and government.

The German army is now just 20% of what it was in 1990. The country is the economic leader in Europe, but Berlin refuses to invest in security and defense — even less so than the UK, France and other European nations.

Konstantin Richter wrote:

“In the decades since World War II, Germans have turned into genuine pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. A majority of the German public opposes combat missions, and supports the Bundeswehr only as a quasi-humanitarian organization, a kind of Médecins Sans Frontières with guns.”.

In a recent Foreign Policy article, Hans Kundnani found that “a simple comparison between the American and German military budget illustrates the problem”. In 2015, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. defense budget was $597.5 billion. Germany’s was $36.7 billion, one-twentieth the size of America’s. The same is true for the number of soldiers: Germany army has shrunk to 176,752 active military personnel, a seventh of the 1.3 million of the United States.

Soldiers of the German army on parade in 2009. (Image source: Włodi/Flickr)

That is why Jochen Bittner of Die Zeit wrote: “For the foreseeable future, don’t count on us Germans”. The late Guido Westerwelle, as Germany’s foreign minister from 2009 to 2013, made the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Germany one of his top priorities.

According Kundnani, this military dysfunction reflects a cultural one:

“In the first decade after reunification in 1990, Germany seemed to be converging with France and the U.K. on the question of the use of military force. This incremental shift culminated in Germany’s participation in the Kosovo War in 1999. ‘Never again Auschwitz’ seemed to have replaced ‘never again war’ as a fundamental principle of German foreign policy. But in the 2000s, against the backdrop of the deployment of the Bundeswehr to Afghanistan and the perceived failures of military interventions elsewhere, Germans seemed to revert to the principle of ‘never again war.’ Germany refused to participate in the military intervention in Libya in 2011 — a decision that many Germans feel has been vindicated. And even the strategic shock of the Ukraine crisis hasn’t changed German attitudes about the use of military force.”

“Pacifism became the German lifestyle“. So a few weeks ago, a German MEP expressed his anger after his 16-year-old daughter received a letter from the army in search of volunteers. “It is outrageous that people so young are being targeted”, said Özcan Mutlu to the news website taz.de. “Young people need protection”. And what does a modern Western society need to be protected? Germany and Europe are not able to answer this question. That is why they are all desperate about Trump’s request to invest more in defending themselves, as if they hope to continue their siesta forever.

The relative abundance enjoyed by the Western post-war generations have created a kind of shame instead of pride. Being born in Europe after the Second World War meant belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable society that, for centuries, oppressed almost all the rest of the planet. Europe’s commitment for the Third World and the “wretched of earth” is accompanied by a strange fatalism: Why defend the feeble Western democracies, since the path of history requires their disappearance? We are supposedly at “the end of history”. That is the moral arrogance pervading the Europeans today: at the time of twilight, we just have to work to our own downfall. That is the mentality through which “pacifism, sometimes in a self-righteous manner, has become part of the German DNA”.

What did Spain do after al-Qaeda bombed Madrid’s trains? It withdrew its army from Iraq. What did France do after the carnage at the Bataclan Theater? It played John Lennon’s “Imagine”. What did Belgium do after the bombings in Brussels? It lit candles. What Germany did after the massacre at the Christmas market in Berlin? It cried, “Je suis Berlin”. There is something so tragic and despairing in the Germany’s lack of will to hunt down and eradicate the Islamic State.

See Germany, which destroyed Europe with its arms race under the Nazis. It is now putting Europe at risk again — but this time out of the fear of a supposed “rearmament spiral”. It is as if they think that just because you do not have an army, this means there can be no fight. But there is good news: the US Marines have just arrived in Syria to fight the Islamic State!

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Deaths that exceed births might sound like science fiction, but they are now Europe’s reality. It just happened. During 2015, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, while 5.2 million persons died, meaning that the EU for the first time in modern history recorded a negative natural change in its population. The numbers come from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), which since 1961 has been counting Europe’s population. It is official.

There is, however, another surprising number: the European population increased overall from 508.3 million to 510.1 million. Have you guessed why? The immigrant population increased, by about two million in one year, while the native European population was shrinking. It is the substitution of a population. Europe has lost the will to maintain or grow its population. The situation is as demographically as seismic as during the Great Plague of the 14th Century.

This shift is what the British demographer David Coleman described in his study, “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition.” Europe’s suicidal birth rate, coupled with migrants who multiply faster, will transform European culture. The declining fertility rate of native Europeans coincides, in fact, with the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the “re-Islamization” of its Muslims.

In 2015, Portugal recorded the second-lowest birth rate in the European Union (8.3 per 1,000 inhabitants) and negative natural growth of -2.2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Which EU country had the lowest birth rate? Italy. Since the “baby boom” of the 1960s, in the country famous for its large families, the birth rate has more halved. In 2015, the number of births fell to 485,000, fewer than in any other year since the modern Italy was formed in 1861.

Eastern Europe now has “the largest population loss in modern history“, while Germany overtook Japan by having the world’s lowest birth rate, when averaged over past five years. In Germany and Italy, the decreases were particularly dramatic, down -2.3% and -2.7% respectively.

Out with the old, in with the new… Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Some businesses are no longer even interested in European markets. Kimberly-Clark, which makes Huggies diapers, has pulled out of most of Europe. The market is simply not cost-effective. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble, which produces Pampers diapers, has been investing in the business of the future: diapers for old people.

Europe is becoming gray; you can feel all the sadness of a world that has consumed itself. In 2008, the countries of the European Union saw the birth of 5,469,000 children. Five years later, there were nearly half a million fewer, 5,075,000 — a decrease of 7%. Fertility rates have not only fallen in countries with aching economies, such as Greece, but also in countries such as Norway, which sailed through the financial crisis.

As Lord Sacks recently said, “falling birth rates could spell the end of the West“. Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Liberals and secularists tend to dismiss the importance of demographic and cultural issues. That is why the most important warnings come from some Christian leaders. The first to denounce this dramatic trend was a great Italian missionary, Father Piero Gheddo, who explained that, due to falling birth rates and religious apathy, “Islam would sooner rather than later conquer the majority in Europe”. He was followed by others, such as Lebanese Cardinal Bechara Rai, who leads the Eastern Catholics aligned with the Vatican. Rai warned that “Islam will conquer Europe by faith and birth rate“. A similar warning just came from yet another cardinal, Raymond Leo Burke.

In one generation from now, Europe will be unrecognizable. People in Europe now largely seem to feel that the identity of their civilization is threatened primarily by a frivolous libertarianism, an ideology under the guise of freedom, that wants to deconstruct all the ties that bind man to his family, his parentage, his work, his history, his religion, his language, his nation, his freedom. It seems to come from an inertia that does not care if Europe succeeds or succumbs, if our civilization disappears, drowned by ethnic chaos, or is overrun by a new religion from the desert.

As a paper in the Washington Quarterly explains, the fatal meeting between Europe’s falling birth rates and rise of Islam has already had significant consequences: Europe has turned into an incubator of terrorism; formed a new poisonous anti-Semitism; seen a political shift to the far right; undergone the biggest crisis in European authoritarian unity and witnessed a refocusing of foreign policy since Europe’s withdrawal from the Middle East.

Demographic suicide is not only experienced; it appears to be wanted. The xenophile European bourgeoisie, which today controls politics and the media, seem imbued with a snobbish and masochistic racism. They have turned against the values of their own Judeo-Christian culture and combined it with a hallucinatory, romanticized view of the values of other cultures. The sad paradox is that Europeans are now importing young people in large numbers from the Middle East to compensate for their lifestyle choices.

An agnostic and sterile continent — deprived of its gods and children because it banished them — will have no strength to fight or to assimilate a civilization of the zealous ad the young. The failure to counter the coming transformation seems to come down on the side of Islam. Is what we are seeing the last days of summer?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Women have literally disappeared from cafés and bars in certain predominantly Muslim suburbs in France, according to recently aired undercover footage from the France 2 television channel. The footage featured two women activists, Nadia Remadna and Aziza Sayah, from the women’s rights campaign group, La Brigade des Mères (Brigade of Mothers), entering a café in the Paris suburb of Sevran, where they were met with surprise and hostility from the all-male customers. One told them: “It is best to wait outside. There are men in here… In this café, there is no diversity.”

Another customer told them: “In this café, there is no mixing. We are in Sevran, not Paris. Here there is a different mentality. It is like back home.”

Aziza Sayah (left) and Nadia Remadna (right) are activists from the “Brigade of Mothers” women’s rights group in France, who recently went with concealed cameras into a café in a Paris suburb, where they were met with surprise and hostility from the all-male customers. (Image source: France 2 video screenshot)

In a suburb of Lyon, France 2 TV journalist Caroline Sinz spoke to a young woman who said that she is quite simply afraid to go out, and wears baggy clothes and no makeup to avoid being targeted by the Muslim men in the neighborhood.

In the words of Sinz, women seem “to have been erased,” from the cafés and the streets. Sinz goes on to explain that women in these areas used to protest against the status quo, but now,

“They are afraid, they have already spoken out in many cities, and were insulted and assaulted… So now to avoid threats, and being put under pressure, they censor themselves and keep quiet.”

Axelle Lemaire, France’s Minister for Digital Affairs, and the first government official to comment on the footage, said the footage appeared to show an “intolerable” and “illegal” case of “discrimination against women”. However, she was quick to add that it was not a question of religion, and said that France’s Muslim communities should not be blamed.

Lemaire’s comment about religion reveals, once more, the willful ignorance that so many in Europe’s political establishment display in their refusal to deal with the issues of Islamization. Sevran is part of the district of Seine-Saint-Denis, an area inhabited by over 600,000 Muslims, out of 1.4 million people. Already in 2011, a report by the highly respected political scientist and expert on Islam, Gilles Kepel, “Banlieue de la République” (“Suburb of the Republic”), showed that Seine-Saint-Denis, as well as other suburbs, were becoming parallel Islamic societies, increasingly cut off from the rest of French society. That women have now disappeared from the streets of Sevran cannot be divorced from the fact of the Islamization of these societies.

This Islamization has been fueled and strengthened by Qatar’s heavy investments — particularly in mosques — in France during the past five years. These investments currently stand at around $22 billion. Investments in mosques are how Qatar is apparently spreading Wahhabism/Salafism — a particularly radical form of Islam — around the world.

Islamic sharia law is quite clear on the role of the woman in Islam; French politicians might be well advised to open a Quran before they pronounce recent events as having “nothing to do with Islam.” The Quran states that a woman must obey her husband in all things [Quran 4:34][1] and that her role is in the home, where she should preferably stay, unless she has a legitimate errand to attend to outside the house [Quran 33:33].[2] In countries where sharia is the law of the land, as in Saudi Arabia, a woman cannot leave the home without permission of her husband.

Considering the subservient role of women in sharia law, it is only a natural development that those French suburbs that have become Islamized and where sharia is held in high regard, now resemble Saudi Arabia. The cumulative effects of Islamization, supported with Qatari money and influence, can come as a surprise only to those political and cultural elites who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge and deal with the realities.

Another French politician, former Labor Minister Eric Woerth, said that the footage “stabs at the heart of the Republic. The heart of the Republic is the equality between men and women”. But is this passionate declaration of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” not a bit belated? Where have these politicians been? A year ago, Pascale Boistard, then France’s Minister for Women’s Rights, said in an interview:

“There are areas in our territory where women are not accepted, where they are not respected, and where they are almost obliged to live with this fact as an annoyance in everyday life. And everyone seems to find it more or less normal… In many neighborhoods, women are limited to certain areas (the foyer, the exit from school …) and virtually absent from others, such as sports venues, or places of entertainment. Is it normal that in some places you cannot find any women in the cafes? There is a misplaced form of morality, often exercised by minority groups over a majority, which leads to the fact that the public space, supposedly belonging to both men and women, is restricted from women”.

The subordination, humiliation and terrorization of women in the suburbs has been going on for decades, right under the noses of those politicians who claim to care about women’s rights and “the heart of the republic,” yet chose to stay ignorant. In 2002, the late author of “Dans l’enfer des tournantes” (“To Hell and Back“), Samira Bellil, described how her life as a teenager in the late 1980s in the suburbs was, as the title suggests, pure hell. Speaking to Time magazine in 2002, she said: “From the moment a girl steps outside, guys think they have the right to pass judgment and treat us differently. In extreme cases, this leads to violence or aggression.” Bellil was gang-raped repeatedly by Muslim youths, who knew her and targeted her, because “any neighborhood girl who smokes, uses makeup or wears attractive clothes is a whore.” At the time, Time magazine further reported:

“[P]olice are loath to patrol the areas for fear of violence. The result: civility and order in many banlieues have broken down, and bands of young men feel they can attack women with impunity…”

This was fifteen years ago.

In the same article, Time also interviewed Fadela Amara, head of the organization, Ni Putes ni Soumise (“Neither Whores nor Submissives”) which campaigns for women to be able live normal, modern lives. Amara said that since 1992, women in the suburbs of France have had to deal with the spreading influence of Islamic fundamentalism:

“Over the past 10 years, the condition of women in the banlieues has radically deteriorated… We are seeing an increase in insults of young women who wear jeans, a rise in forced or arranged marriages, more young women obliged to drop out of school and a greater incidence of polygamy.”

Fifteen years later, French ministers feign surprise and outrage that women in these suburbs have finally succumbed to the incessant terror against them and are disappearing from the streets.

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

[1] Quran 4:34: “Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance – [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them.”

[2] Quran 33:33: “And abide in your houses and do not display yourselves as [was] the display of the former times of ignorance. And establish prayer and give zakah and obey Allah and His Messenger. Allah intends only to remove from you the impurity [of sin], O people of the [Prophet’s] household, and to purify you with [extensive] purification.”