Well, I don't disagree with that. Some of us have tried to help by protesting outside the Iranian embassy when students are being hammered, but is it much help? One can only try.
But as Bricmont points out in his latest, 'Humanitarian Imperialism', support is usually a sentimental category, an alignment as passive as 'support' for one's football team. He says, significantly for this debate, and the one on Marxmail: "The rhetoric of support has numerous drawbacks. It locks militants into useless discussions regarding conflicts over which they have not the slightest influence (what should Trotsky have done in 1924?) and isolates them from the general population, which quite rightly regards such discussions as the modern counterparts of the Byzantine dispute over the sex of the angels. Moreover, it leads them into a pursuit of historical erudition that gets in the way of understanding today's world or persuading other people they need to change it. Finally, those imaginary supports end up being followed by often painful and politically catastrophic disillusion. How many people have themselves been reproach for having 'supported' Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, and subsequently abandoned all political activity, when, unless they actually lived and were active in the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, all they ever really did was to express opinions, perhaps mistaken, but with no impact on the course of world events?"
And here he goes on in a vein that I find difficult to cite, but I quote again: "The latest avatar of the support problem concerns the Iraqi resistance. How does one dare support those cutthroats and adversaries of democracy? To which others reply: Don't people have the right to defend themselves? Note first of all that when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the Western consensus demanding their withdrawal did not usually dwell on support for the Afghan resistance, support which would have raised serious questions if the nature of the resistance had come under closer scrutiny ... One of the main things wrong with the rhetoric of support is that it accepts the logic of the adversary: they accuse us of 'supporting' the other camp ... a minimum of modesty should lead us to think that, far from us supporting a resistance that isn't asking for anything, it is the resistance that supports us. After all, the resistance is much more effective in blocking the US military machine, at least for a while, than the millions of demonstrators that marched peacefully against the war and who unfortunately did not manage to stop the soldiers or the bombs. Without the Iraqi resistance, the United States would perhaps today be attacking Damascus, Tehran, Caracas, or Havana. If I do not claim to 'support' the Iraqi resistance, for which I am sometimes criticised, the reason, among other things, is that an Iraqi insurgent could always ask, echoing Stalin's remark about the pope, how many divisions will you send into battle? It is true, as is often pointed out in response to Stalin's wisecrack, that ideas can be effective. And the combat on the level of ideas, for example through opinion tribunals such as the World Tribunal on Iraq and its branch the Brussels Tribunal, can be considered a 'support' to the Iraqi resistance (and be denounced or applauded as such)."