In his article, Wilkinson noted Germany’s population of 4.8 million Muslims, and wrote that even if 25 percent of them supported Sharia law, that would translate to only 1.45 percent of the total German population. “What can that tiny sliver of the population possibly do to undermine the institutions of one of Europe’s strongest states, and a national culture deeply committed to liberal ideals?” he asked.

Of course, there are many awful things that a dedicated minority can inflict on a society short of the entire nation-state’s being destroyed and the majority population abandoning its civilizational code. For one, they can change the kind of things police have to worry about. Just a few days before Wilkinson proclaimed German institutions impregnable, those same institutions were scrambling for speakers of Afghan to help them in their investigation of a murder in a Bavarian supermarket, in which an Afghan asylum seeker stabbed another Afghan woman to death in front of her two children because she had converted to Christianity. I’m sure some statistician can explain that this woman was more likely to die from the heat death of the universe, but there it is.

Widespread sympathy for Islamic extremism can change the composition of a country’s population. Look to France, where in 2014 more than one in six Muslims said they supported Islamic State. Only a few of the dozen or so Islamic terror incidents over the last five years have targeted French Jews. But lots of other crimes and bias incidents have, including harassment of synagogues. As a result, French Jews are emigrating in record numbers. Remember, crime in France now includes incidents such as the one in which Sarah Halami, a Jewish woman, was beaten and thrown off her balcony to her death by a man reciting Koranic verses. Like the Bavarian supermarket killer, this murderer was promptly thrown into a looney bin. “Without the Jews, France is no longer France. It’s the oldest community. They have been French citizens since the French revolution,” said Manuel Valls, a former French prime minister.