On Mosque Madness, The Onion’s Satire Is Indistinguishable from Reality

You’ve probably caught this video of Glenn Beckapalooza attendees showing their utter cluelessness on a range of current affairs — it’s gone viral in the past few days.

About halfway through, the subject of the not-a-mosque-which-isn’t-at-Ground-Zero comes up, and a fashionably attired gentleman says, in all seriousness, “I learned everything I need to know about Islam on 9/11.”

Which reminded me of this less-than-serious item from The Onion:

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims

Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world.

Gentries, 48, said he had absolutely no interest in exposing himself to further knowledge of Islamic civilization or putting his sweeping opinions into a broader context of any kind, and confirmed he was “perfectly happy” to make a handful of emotionally charged words the basis of his mistrust toward all members of the world’s second-largest religion.

“I learned all that really matters about the Muslim faith on 9/11,” Gentries said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United States undertaken by 19 of Islam’s approximately 1.6 billion practitioners. “What more do I need to know to stigmatize Muslims everywhere as inherently violent radicals?”

Real wingnuttery and satire are becoming ever harder to differentiate.