Crackpots love to throw out indisputable facts and juxtapose them to arrive at crackpot conclusions.
This is how it works: The existence of satellites and my dog biting me yesterday are facts. If anyone disputes the crackpot's conclusion--that the satellites told my dog to bite me--he is asked, well, are any of my facts incorrect? Are they? Huh, huh?
Our lady of little sense does the same thing here: Lewis was unaccounted for during WW2 + Lewis is an authority on Islam = Lewis is the mastermind of all policy toward the Islamic world in the last 55 years. Hey, are you disputing my facts?
Well, actually, anyone who would call Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey "an attack on Kemalism" or who thinks Lewis is an admirer of Osama Bin Laden is wrong on the facts. But the facts don't matter. Prove a crackpot wrong on the facts, and he'll run along and collect new and different facts which "prove" his original conclusion.
This is why it's impossible to argue with any crackpot, lucid or otherwise.
Or, if you prefer, a celebrity-driven culture's belief that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Or, the belief of some good-hearted American citizens in WWI that they were really "making the world safe for democracy"...