To add another note to this, whether it's Iran or child sexual abuse or anything else, you can't understand what it is without studying it closely. But they happen to be topics that people who never think about pontificating on, say, physics without studying it feel like they can say just about anything without studying it. Western leftists are no exception to this. Those who present information that contradicts the ideas that an uninformed public have are regarded as apologists for evil.
The American government and mass media trade on ignorance and a strong desire to safeguard it from any contradictory information that exist among the American public, both in domestic and foreign policy. The most recent example is Iraq.
It seems to me that the most important job for Western leftists right now, to defend what's left of liberty, is to counter the politics of fear and loathing that rightists excel in and centrists coopt to triangulate. Unfortunately, however, too many Western leftists are as uninformed about and fearful of some of the objects of fear and loathing today. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>