[TTP:  Continuing from yesterday…]

VII. Why They Got It Wrong

These were not fools. Chomsky is one of the most formidable intellects of the last century.

Malcolm Caldwell, a Scottish academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies who defended the regime in print until the end, was by all accounts a decent man whom people liked.

Gareth Porter was a serious scholar who testified before Congress.

So what actually happened?

Three things, and none of them require anybody to be stupid or wicked.

The first is that the scepticism was earned. These men had spent a decade watching their own government lie about Southeast Asia.

The Gulf of Tonkin. The secret bombing of Cambodia itself, which the United States conducted for over four years and concealed from Congress. The body counts. The Pentagon Papers had been published in 1971 and had confirmed the pattern in the government’s own words.

A person who had learned from all that to disbelieve official atrocity narratives about communist forces in Indochina had learned it from experience.

On the morning of 17 April 1975, the gates of Phnom Penh opened and a smiling army walked in.

People came out into the street to cheer them. That detail matters and it gets left out of most tellings.

Five years of civil war were over, the American bombers were gone, the corrupt and collapsing Lon Nol government was finished, and the young men coming down the boulevards in black pyjamas and sandals cut from tyres were, for a few hours, liberators. Some of the soldiers were fourteen years old. People handed them food.

Within hours the order went out.

Leave the city. All of it. Now.

In the UK:

“Only the Conservatives and Reform can be relied upon to uphold women’s rights.”

There is a danger that we draw the wrong conclusions from the Liberal Democrats’ decision to champion trans demands over women’s rights on the very first full day of their conference.

On the face of it, it feels like an own goal, made even worse by a clear misunderstanding on the part of delegates about the guidelines issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in the wake of the ruling by the Supreme Court on how the Equality Act should be interpreted.

Those gathering in Brighton have stated that the EHRC code is “discriminatory and unworkable” and should be overwritten with more “inclusive” rules. But the EHRC is bound by law to issue guidance entirely in line with the Equality Act.

It would be absurd – not to mention illegal – for the EHRC to issue guidance that didn’t reflect their lordships’ ruling on what the Equality Act meant by “women.”

This detail seems to have escaped the trans activists among the Lib Dem delegates, who are also calling for the actual law to be changed but haven’t made their minds up as to what change is needed.

Ultimately, their aim, as is the aim of trans rights activists across the political spectrum, is to deny women the right to exclude from their spaces – changing rooms, toilets and even prisons – men who identify as women. Such men, after all, are women if they say so.

This motion will dominate today’s debate at the conference, and it is understandable that thoughtful observers predict difficult times ahead for a party that places the demands of trans-identified men above the hard-fought-for sex-based rights of women.

But they miss a key factor in all of this.

Tucker Carlson has famously written off his distrust of Islam to western propaganda. “I was hysterical,” he said. “I believed [the threat was real]. No, that's not true. Nothing about that is true, but I believed it.”

Going a step further, Carlson now claims, “Sharia Law has made Islamic societies more advanced than the West.”

If Carlson wishes to remain secure in his sanctimony, I would advise him not to speak to a former imam whose book, The Apostate, I had the honor of editing.

If, however, Carlson is as open to the the truth as he claims to be, I will happily send him a signed copy and pick up the postage to boot.

As a boy, Muhammad Abdullah was groomed to become the Franklin Graham of Egyptian Islam, his father being that nation’s preeminent political imam.

As an adolescent, Abdullah was already leading hajjes to Mecca.

Having been educated in English schools, he had a language advantage over his father. His goal was to exploit that advantage and win over the West.

To that end, Abdullah took a year off after college to master the faith so completely no westerner could ever challenge him.

“I had begun my studies from a place of total and complete submission to Allah,” writes Abdullah. “I believed that Islam was superior to all other faiths and that those faiths had borrowed from Islam. I believed that Islam’s every prayer, every ritual, every law had no other purpose than to serve Allah.”