"Everything I need to know about Islam..."

I find the New Left Media's in-the-field interviews with the Tea Party to be incredibly enlightening.  Now of course, I understand that there are factions of the group that aren't ignorant red-necks.  There are many well-educated capitalists who just plain ol' don't like Obama because they ain't up on their Marx and think he's worse than Stalin (funny, I haven't heard tell of any big socialist push). 

Then there's the rank-and-file, once again exhibited beautifully by NLM just letting people do the talking for themselves:



The most interesting thing, however, is the expose on anti-Islam sentiment.  It's frightening, really, that people can be so ignorant, so racist, so xenophobic... if this is truly the "voice of America," I'm sad for my country.  There is a moment at 9:38 where a man says, "I learned all I needed to know about Islam on 9/11."

The first thing that came to mind was an article that was published recently on The Onion:

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Islam

It's one of those things that's both hilarious and tragic: hilarious because The Onion captured and lampooned the sentiment so brilliantly, tragic because they didn't have to go to any great lengths to make it ridiculous.

To respond to the gentleman (?) in the NLM video...

What if I were to say that I learned all I needed to know about Christianity on May, 31, 2009? Or March 10, 1993? Or July 27, 1996? Or January 16, 1997?  January 29, 1998? What if I then decided that, by virtue of your religious convictions, you must be an anti-abortion terrorist and should therefore be shunned by society? Or that you must be a member of the Westboro Baptist Church?

What if you heard an Iraqi saying he learned everything he needs to know about America between March 20, 2003 and the present?

What if a Native American said she learned everything she needed to know about white people in 1492?

A gay man saying he learned everything he needs to know about heterosexual men on October 12, 1998?

Just admit you're a crotchety old man that's completely unwilling to to accept that you're not the only human being on the planet.  Also a racist.