Will the Jewish people, will Israel outlive the great civilizations of Europe?

Could it be that Israel, and its Children — the Jewish people — will outlive the great civilizations of Europe?

Will Italy, Germany,  Belgium, and France go the way of the ancient Egyptians as they usher in a massive, hostile force of occupation to replace their dwindling increasingly nihilistic populations?

It seems, now, almost certain.

No wonder Israel and the Jewish people remain the number one target for those driving this dystopian agenda.  No wonder every effort is made to vilify and isolate them.

For millennia, their stubborn, extraordinary refusal to abandon that which defines them as a people–their history, their traditions, and their land– has been an affront to the powerful. Through the ages, repeated attempts to crush, enslave, and annihilate them have failed.

Even as a nation in exile, expelled from their homeland by the Romans, scattered across the earth,  with only their ancient traditions and unyielding ties to their land with which– as a people–they are synonymous, they persevered.

How many mighty civilizations have the Hebrews outlived over thousands of years?

But for Israel, how many lost, conquered, forsaken nations, and forgotten indigenous tongues, have been reborn, restored?   The same will not be true for Italy, Sweden and France.  Once lost, it will be forever.   In a hundred years, or even fifty, there will be no exiled French families yearning for their homeland to cry out, “Next year in Paris!”

In Israel, against the odds,  the Jewish  people do more than survive; they live free.

In Israel, the Jews thrive and multiply in spite of constant hostility– amidst constant persecution, treachery and violence.

In the wake of what is unfolding around it, in Europe and beyond -as a nation and people– Israel’s existence and Jewish traditions are a profound expression of resistance.

Perhaps, instead of attacking, the world’s peoples should take a moment to learn a thing or two from these stiff-necked Jews.

Mark Twain – September 1897 (Quoted in The National Jewish Post & Observer, June 6, 1984)

The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmaties, of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind.  All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains.  What is the secret of his immortality? “

Europe: The Substitution of a Population

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 and 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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8761/europe-population-substitution