We must be prepared for more Anders Breiviks

One of the problems with Colonel Gaddafi is that from time to time he is in the habit of speaking an inconvenient truth. OK, let's not exaggerate, from time he speaks grains of inconvenient truths.

Since 2006 the Libyan leader has been proposing that Islam should be the religion of Europe - he even said so in Rome during his visit there two years ago.

Furthermore, Gaddafi said last year that it will become Europe's major religion and that European governments will have Muslims in them by 2050. He said this was sure to happen because of the growth of the Muslim population in Europe, which he claims could be "more than 50 per cent if Turkey joins the EU".

Last October Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany seemed to half agree with the colonel when she denounced the failure of multiculturalism in her country in her party conference speech in Potsdam. As a good daughter of a Lutheran pastor she suggested that the Muslims of Germany must integrate more and sign up to the basic values - mostly taken from secular Christianity - embraced by the constitution of today's federal Germany.

All this has particular point and accent in the aftermath of the massacre of 76 Norwegians by Anders Behring Breivik. He aimed to murder the Labour prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and youth members of the party at their summer camp because they are the appeasers who have allowed Muslim immigrants to get more than a toehold in Norway.

The issue was summed up a couple of days ago by one of the most socially and politically observant and astute officers I have known in the British Army, or any other army for that matter.

I cannot name him, because it was a private conversation and under Queen's Regulations he can't be named. But he has worked with Special Forces in key positions in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and Afghanistan – and he happens to know Dewsbury and Leeds, whence the 7/7 bombers launched their attack on London in July 2005.
 
"What we are seeing with the Breivik attack is the widening spread of fear - an irrational reaction to the growing Islamic presence in Europe," he told me. "Gaddafi predicted at the African Union summit last year that Muslims would be in European governments by 2050. Almost in the same month we had Angela Merkel suggesting a Muslim presence in government by 2040."

He concluded with a chilling line. "What we have seen in Norway might be part of a trend - it is the spread of fear from not knowing what to do about a changing society and a changing world. We must be ready for more such extreme acts."

His words were prescient. In the past two or three days we have had a stream of correspondence, through the media, particularly the chatrooms and the net, broadly condemning Breivik's deeds, but sympathising with much of the sentiment in his rambling 1,500-page manifesto.

But what of the statistics?

The problem with the numbers on Islamic migration and population growth in Europe is that they tend to tell half truths. It is almost impossible to predict what will happen in 2050. Population surges can suddenly slow down. The prediction by Professor Bernard Lewis, the Republicans' favourite Islamic guru in the US, that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century", can't be supported by anything more than ideological guesswork.
 
About the most reliable and most available numbers are those from the Pew Forum. The Muslim population of (western) Europe has grown from 29.6 million in 1990 to 44.1 million in 2010, the Forum has reported recently, and will be about eight per cent of Europe’s population by 2030, some 58,210,000.

This translates as an increase in Muslim populations in France from 4,784,000 today to 6,880,000 in 2030 and in Germany from 4,119,000 to 5,545,000 in the same period, while in the UK it will rise from 2,869,000 to 5,567,000. Norway with 144,000 Muslims today will have 359,000 in 2030, it is estimated.

Behind this projected rise are the issues of immigration, and how that will surge or fall, and the plain fact of natality or fertility among Muslim residents exceeding that of most indigenous populations – who are barely replacing themselves.

This accounts for the huge change in inner-city populations through much of urbanised Europe, with Muslim births far outstripping others. In some German and Dutch inner cities at a rate of eight to one. By 2050, urban Europe may well be 20 to 25 per cent Muslim.

This raises the question addressed by Chancellor Merkel, albeit rather clumsily, in her speech to her CDU party last October. How will the Muslim communities live with the others in the framework of the western secular pluralist democratic state? This is a matter of debate within many Islamic communities.

Another central issue is the evolving status and role of women – a big issue for all Muslim communities from Djakarta to Dakar, Kabul to Cologne and Coventry. The empowerment of women will be critical – which is usually underplayed by the polemicists of the populist right who seem to work on the politics of panic by statistics.

The imagery of Breivik's manifesto does fit in the broad spectrum of the polemics of the racist right. Take for example his embrace of Nordic myth, a sort of Wagnerian world of gods and trolls – without the music or the laughs. It is shared with the xenophobic absurdities of the Italian Northern League and the northern European neo-Nazi groups.

Inadvertently, Breivik's manifesto may have done a service to serious debate in Europe, according to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Green bloc in the European parliament. "So much of what he wrote could have been said by any rightwing politician," he said, "so a lot of arguments about immigrants and Islamic fundamentalism will be much easier to question and to push back."
 
For reasonable reflection few could improve on the concluding words by Jo Nesbo, who as a reporter and author has explored so many dark corners of Norway's past and present, in yesterday's International Herald Tribune.
 
"After the bomb went off – an explosion I felt from over a mile away – and reports of the shootings out on the island of Utoeya began to come in, I asked my daughter whether she was scared. She replied by quoting something I had once said to her: 'Yes, but if you're not scared, you can't be brave'.
 
"So if there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naive fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward. To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: 'Is this all you've got?' To refuse to let fear change the way we build society." ·