Heinsohn is also hesitant to ascribe to Islam a core from which one may deduce later actions or patterns of action. As an example he mentions the movement of 1968, to which he himself belonged. "When the time is ripe, new religious pamphlets and books will be written on the spot and in no time. From your holy books — the Koran, the Bible, The Communist Manifesto etc. — you take what fits your purpose. You know that you are going to use violence but want a justification. For you are a righteous person. But when the youth bulge is spent, the books that were distributed in millions of copies cannot even be sold in second-hand bookshops. Everybody knows that they are full of rubbish. But while the movement is on, these young men are impervious to arguments. So the false ideas do not arise from holy scripture. They are generated by the young men themselves because they need wrong ideas to justify their actions. Consequently you cannot stop them by explaining that their ideas are wrong. The movement is not created by wrong ideas. On the contrary, the wrong ideas are created by the movement. Islam does not create Islamism, young Muslims do."
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"What happens in Europe is that all the countries — there are no exceptions — are ageing nations that do not fully reproduce themselves. Thus they have embarked on a process where they eat each other's talents. Why are they not looking for talent in Africa, where the population has grown from 100 million in 1900 to an estimated 2 billion in 2050? Why not in Islam, where we have a similar population explosion? Why is America looking for talent in Germany, why is Denmark looking for Poles? Because the third world countries do not have the educational level that is needed in the developed countries that can only maintain their position through innovation. For that purpose they need young people who have grown up in a high-tech society. It is not because Africans or Muslims are not as intelligent as others, they are just not socialised in a way that makes them useful in our societies."
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"I will leave the evaluation of Danish conditions to the Danes. However, we experience the same phenomenon in England. There we have a population within the population, namely the Pakistanis, who have the highest birth rate in the country, and who are most dependent on social transfers. In the Western countries we have a social system that is hardly being used by the local population. On the other hand there is an immigrant population whose women cannot compete in the local workforce. For Danish and German women the welfare benefits are too low to be attractive. Not so for the immigrants. So what we see in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands are immigrant women who take low-paid jobs which they supplement with public benefits. It is not a fantastic income but sufficient for them. And this creates a career type for women only, which their daughters carry on." "But the sons do not have this option. They grow up on the bottom of society without the intellectual skills needed to improve their social position. It is these boys who burn Paris, who burn parts of Bremen. Some of them make it to university and become leaders of the others — not poor, but young men with low status who believe that they are oppressed because of their Islamic faith, but in reality it is the welfare state itself that has created this class of losers."
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Look at the Polish people," says Heinsohn — who was born in 1943 in the city now known as Gdansk, but which he still calls Danzig, the son of a German submarine captain who lost his life near Newfoundland five months before his son was born. "Here is a nation with proud traditions. Poland saved Europe from the Mongols, the Turks and the Bolsheviks and ended up bringing down Communism. And yet they have a lower birth rate than the Germans. They are down to 1.2 children per woman. In addition, over the last 15 years they have already lost 2 million of their best people. Perhaps emigrants tell their parents that they are coming back, but they won't. That is why I am saying that countries such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are doomed. They have no attraction for immigrants. The same thing is happening with Russia. Who wants to move to Russia? And look at the newest members of the EU, Bulgaria and Romania. Romania is the first country in the world where there are more retirees than active workers, and we let them in. The same with Bulgaria, which has the world's fastest-dwindling population. The young are moving out, and with a clean conscience, because they believe that tomorrow Brussels will pay for their parents. So the EU has accepted 27 million people who wanted to get inside to secure their pensions. And in the European centre they are still overjoyed to have attracted millions more than the USA. That will make us strong, they believe."
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Clinton's social reform "But let me point out what happened in the USA. During the election campaign of 1992 Bill Clinton, in a famous phrase, promised to 'end welfare as we know it'. In 1935 the USA had passed the 'Aid to Dependent Children'-act (from 1960 known as 'Aid to Families with Dependent Children', ed.), which guaranteed every mother with small children help from the state. Again it was a question of the father who had fallen from the scaffold, and very few received support because of this law. However, in 1965 morals had changed. Until then it would have been unthinkable to a mother — whether she was white or black — to become pregnant, hide the identity of the father and then let the public pay for her kids. Now she did not even have to push the father out of a tall building. This caused an explosion of the number of welfare-dependent American families. From 1965 to 1995 their share rose to 10 per cent of all American families and 15 per cent of the children. That was the reality Clinton had to face." "Most of these welfare dependents were blacks, and that made racists claim that the problem was in the black genes. But the Republicans and the Democrats worked together on a new law, 'Temporary Assistance for Needy Families', which was a smart law. It told American women: We will give you welfare up to five years. You decide whether it should be five years straight, or whether you want to divide the five years into shorter periods. The new law was passed in 1996 and took effect on January 1, 1997. It caused several top officials in the Clinton administration to walk out in protest stating the law was a racist attack on the weakest — single mothers and their children. They had predicted that by 1997-98, the number of adversely affected would have grown from 12 to 14 million. As it turned out, it was these well-meaning people who were the racists. The black girls were smart enough to go on the pill with the result that the welfare-dependent population shrank from 12 million to 4 million. It was the most successful social reform in history."
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The last quote, “would have been unthinkable to a mother — whether she was white or black — to become pregnant, hide the identity of the father and then let the public pay for her kids”, I think, points to the limits of Heinsohn’s demographic approach. What is “thinkable” and what is “unthinkable” is a matter of religion, or some quasi-religious moral authority. It is not the matter of welfare policy alone. It is when the culture is lacking from the beginning, or experiences a collapse due to some extraneous force, that welfare becomes a destructive element that leads to the phenomenon of idle hostile youth.
Which points us back to the collapse of Christianity as a universal cultural force in the West and the outward-looking culture of Jihad in Islam. It’s in the world of ideas that demographic decisions are made.