Oh, so let me get this straight. I’m with the terrorists because I “implied” (which is a shorthand for “Dan Simon just wants to read extra stuff which isn’t there into bi’s words”) that abb1 might have “some substance” when he points out that Noam Chomsky isn’t for building a Caliphate.

But it’s an indisputable fact that Dan Simon’s logic is indisputable, because that’s what the indisputable Dan Simon keeps telling us… so who am I to argue with him, eh?

And again, what exactly moral obscenities are you talking about? The American government murdered 4 million people in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, and incidentally in a much more barbaric way than the Khmer Rouge – burning them alive, poisoning them by dioxin, destroying their environment. Are you joining Chomsky and Herman in their outrage against the US mass-media whitewashing these horrific crimes and their perpetrators or not? I want the answer, Dan.

Ponchaud cites a Cambodian report that 200,000 people were killed in American bombings from March 7 to August 15, 1973. No source is offered, but suspicions are aroused by the fact that Phnom Penh radio announced on May 9, 1975 that there were 200,000 casualties of the American bombing in 1973, including “killed, wounded, and crippled for life” (Hildebrand and Porter). Ponchaud cites “Cambodian authorities” who give the figures 800,000 killed and 240,000 wounded before liberation. The figures are implausible. By the usual rule of thumb, wounded amount to about three times killed; quite possibly he has the figures reversed.

We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.

But they all will be defeated eventually by The Knight In Shining Armor Riding On The White Horse. Resistance is futile! Not to mention “resistance”.

Exactly. Radical leftists whitewash mass murderers—and other radical leftists jump in to whitewash the whitewashers. As with the Khmer Rouge, so with the Lebanese and Iraqi “resistance”.

But then what are all those radical leftists doing marching in solidarity with Hezbollah, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and so on?

what radical leftists? When? What are you talking about?

I think we just call it Godwin’s Law 2.0.

Indeed (as some bloggers are fond of saying).

The radical Left (and for that matter the not so radical left) want an extension of democracy, and more and more of public life (e.g. business) brought under democratic control:

I’m not at all convinced of this…but I’ll take it as a given, for the sake of argument.

this is a view that OBL is not, I gather, in sympathy with.

So you gather—and so I gather, too. But then what are all those radical leftists doing marching in solidarity with Hezbollah, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and so on? Could it be that their assessment of their new allies is different from ours?

Are you really trying to tell us that you think Noam Chomsky or Edward Herman were looking at Afghanistan in the ‘90s and going ‘my socialist dream! realised at last!’

Why not? They looked at Khmer Rouge Cambodia in the ‘70s and went, “my socialist dream! realized at last!”. How much more self-delusion does it require, really, to find common cause with the Taliban? (Or with Hezbollah, to which Chomsky has recently explicitly extended his warm embrace?)

if your reply is going to be something similar to the latest ramblings by Nick Cohen, along the lines that ‘the radical left is now indistinguishable from Islamism’ then I’m not going to bother replying.

I doubt even Nick Cohen describes them as “indistinguishable from”. Isn’t “united in solidarity with” damning enough?

No, Islamists, unlike the radical left, have a strategy, a plan that could, conceivably (it only really requires divine intervention) lead to their goals.