Evil and stupid. Here's a paragraph from today's Washington Post, featuring a lovely quote from our good friend Bill O'Reilly, the man who puts "unbalanced" back in "fair and balanced":

But a national TV talk show host, Fox News Network's Bill O'Reilly, compared the assignment to teaching "Mein Kampf" in 1941 and questioned the purpose of making freshmen study "our enemy's religion."

Context? UNC has asked its freshmen to read a book about Islam, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, as a pre-college reading assignment.

Just another reason to pigeonhole conservatives as demagogues who need to oversimplify issues in order to attack them. One, Nazism was not a religion. Two, Mein Kampf was a political tract, not an academic discussion of a religious text. Third, even if you buy the argument that Islam is our "enemy"--a contention I vehemently disagree with even as I support, with reservations, the current war--isn't it best to defeat the enemy by knowing him?