The Dutch politician Geert Wilders is becoming increasingly well-known the world over. Often, however, non-Dutch commentators do not realize what exactly his viewpoints and standpoints are. He is sometimes seen, especially by Christians, as some kind of (wanna-be) liberator of the West. A liberator of (supposed) growing Islamic influence, that is. Wilders thrives upon the spreading fear of Islam in Western countries. He speaks of the ‘Islamization’ of the Netherlands, and Europe in general. A while ago, an article in The Telegraph was cause for concern among many, and also Wilders jumped (here, article in Dutch; see also the document with the questions that were asked by his party in the ‘senate’) on the results of new research that was presented in the article. The article claimed that by 2050, 20% of the inhabitants of Europe would consist of Muslims. Holland was projected to reach that mark even sooner. Many repeat this claim uncritically—or often even more outrageous claims, some of which even speak of a projected majority of Muslims by 2050—without checking the numbers, and subsequently fear for the future of the Netherlands. There are two reasons why such explosive projections lack substance.

First, the official numbers as estimated by the Dutch governmental body in charge of all kinds of yearly statistics, the CBS (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek), do not support such a claim, or anything remotely like it. All of the information can be found on their website (www.cbs.nl). Let’s look at a few graphs and numbers (I collected all the information from the CBS website, and plotted a few graphs based on the data).

Up until 2004, the CBS estimated the number of Muslims by taking into account the percentage of Muslims in the country of origin and by using some external research. In an article (here and here) on their website, they explain that from 2005 onwards they will also start using data acquired through official surveys.

Let’s first look at the data of the old and naive estimations (click on the images for a bigger version).

Graph 1

A steady increase of Muslims. If the trend continues, the number of Muslims should go through the one-million mark very shortly after 2004. Does it look dangerous yet? Let’s put it into perspective. Now a graph with the same numbers, but combined with the numbers of the total population of the Netherlands.

Graph 2

When put in perspective, the ‘threat’ seems relatively small, if not non-existent. Moreover, we mentioned something about changing ways of estimating and that should give a slightly better view of the amounts of Muslims in the Netherlands. The next graph uses the new data from 2005 onwards, but uses the old data up until 2004 (the survey data from before 2005 was not as reliable, the CBS admits). Note that the sharp drop in numbers of Muslims from the year 2004 to 2005 does not indicate that their number grew that much smaller in the course of one year, but simply that the numbers are smaller than they had first expected due to an updated estimation method. 2005 is the first year, then, that the new method was used.

Graph 3 shows the estimated number of Muslims, whereas Graph 4 shows those same numbers together with the total population.

Graph 3

Graph 4

That is surprising, isn’t it? The (slightly) more realistic numbers turn out to reveal a smaller number of Muslims than what was hitherto expected. Also, importantly, the number has not risen significantly over the last four years. In the next post I will take a look at reason #2 why the claims of a so-called Islamization are nothing more than unfounded, fear-mongering tactics. I also still owe you an explanation why Wilders stands for the destruction of democracy, as indicated in the title of this post. All that and more in the next post. One last graph trick, for the heck of it: the percentage of the Dutch population that is Muslim, from 1995 to 2008 (Graph 5; click on the image for a bigger version).

Graph 5

Toward the twenty percent? I guess not. Stay tuned for more.

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