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Last update - 12:31 01/04/2008 Welcome to the demographic jungle By Anshel Pfeffer Tags: muslims, demographics  According to the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See has just realized that there are more Muslims in the world than Catholics. The compiler of the Vatican's yearbook, Monsignor Vittorio Formenti says that there are 1,322 billion Muslims living in the world and only 1,130 billion Catholics. So it's now official, the followers of Mohammed are winning the numbers game. But at least there is still some comfort, he says, if you add on all the different kinds of Christians, there are over 2 billion of them, still a wide enough margin. Never, it seems, has the Vicar of Rome been so favorable to his Protestant brothers. I would offer the good priest some more consolation: why lump all the Muslims together? If you break them down to the main groups, Sunni and Shi'a, and add on the Sufis and even the Alawites, then they might actually seem smaller and the Catholics will back on top again. Advertisement But this all too ridiculous. The church venerates the martyrs who were persecuted and slain in the days when Christianity was a small underground sect, is it so insecure today that being number 2 in size makes it feel less divine? So what if there are more Muslims than Christians? It's not as if we're about to have world elections to decide which is the only true religion. Is that why the Pope went out of his way to stick his finger in the collective Muslim eye by personally baptizing journalist Magdi Allam? I used to think that all this demographobia was only a Jewish syndrome, but it seems that other religions can get caught with the illness just the same. Being Jewish, it's almost amusing to see how the Vatican is all worked up by the Muslim demon, but perhaps this should give us cause to reconsider some of own pet concerns. How many times have we heard sentences like, "imagine how many Jews there would be in the world if wasn't for the pogroms/Spanish Inquisition/Holocaust/assimilation etc" or read threatening statistics about the disappearance of Jews from various corners of the globe and of course, the "nightmare scenario" when there will be more Arabs than Jews in the land of Israel. And of course there are the schemes whereby we overturn the demographic balance by welcoming back in to the fold the long-lost Ten Tribes or the descendants of the Spanish Marranos. Of course every Jew lost, both physically and spiritually, is a tragedy, and a mass movement of returnees is an intriguing prospect (though the Orthodox rabbinate would never let that happen). But would the fact that all of a sudden, there were in the world, twice as many as the current 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 million Jews (we don't the real figure and perhaps that's a good thing), change us in any drastic way. Would the Jewish identity of a new generation be any stronger for it? Would the state of Israel be more secure? Would we be more capable of fulfilling those much vaunted, yet so ill defined, Jewish ideals? Let's give the numbers game a rest Bookmark to del.icio.us   A top priority Barack Obama: We will keep Israel's security a priority. Tale of a key Cartoon film on Nakba describes Jews as 'enemies of homeland'.   1.   what nightmare scenario? 14:43  |  Mohammed Choudhury 01/04/08   2.   Two Things To Consider 01:28  |  ARABdruzeMUSLIM 02/04/08   3.   Catholicism and Islam spread by the sword 22:23  |  Buddy 02/04/08   4.   AS IF NUMBERS MEAN ANYTHING! 20:29  |  TripleJump 03/04/08   5.   The meer overpopulation should be more of a concern 18:40  |  Dror 05/04/08   6.   # 2 Winston Churchill hated Muslims 14:42  |  petra 06/04/08   7.   A German`s point of view on Islam (1) 05:42  |  Ted 09/04/08   8.   A German`s point of view on Islam.(2) 05:45  |  Ted 09/04/08   9.   A German`s point of view on Islam. (3) 05:48  |  Ted 09/04/08   10.   Submit or Die? That`s peace? 05:54  |  Veritas Vincit 11/04/08   11.   You don`t seem to get the message 09:46  |  Neighbour 12/04/08   12.   Knowlage of islam for others 14:52  |  Wessam 13/04/08   13.   # 12 Wessam on 9-11 we saw Islam 14:55  |  petra 14/04/08   14.   Ted # 7, 8, 9. 15:02  |  petra 14/04/08   15.   Numbers games we won`t win 21:02  |  Joseph 14/04/08   16.   Israel will be like the sands of the sea in numbers 04:44  |  marilyn 17/04/08   17.   #6 to petra 06:13  |  housam 22/04/08   18.   Ted you made a great point! 08:25  |  Joel 22/04/08   19.   I suppose the common denominator of Catholics Muslims is 00:24  |  Dennie 28/04/08   20.   Why is it o.k. for Jews to generalize about others? 18:30  |  - 30/04/08   21.   So Islam is becoming bigger than Christianity? 01:18  |  Bruno Caronte 10/05/08   22.   history repeating 13:40  |  Crusader 12/05/08

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