That "something" may be there doesn't mean that there exists the thing that is alleged to be there.
The Jewish dress code story is a case in point. Jews in Iran do suffer from discrimination: Jews and others minorities are excluded from "'sensitive' senior posts in the military and judiciary" (Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall, and Robert Tait, "Iran's Jews Learn to Live with Ahmadinejad," The Guardian, 27 June 2006, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1807160,00.html>). The President of Iran has made statements giving space to white Holocaust revisionists. The statements appear to be part of Iran's political culture (which is a mind-boggling mixture of sane and insane, from my outsider's perspective), too: an interview with Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review is listed on the Web site of Iran's English-language radio station, marring what looks to be an otherwise interesting lineup featuring many Jewish-American leftists: <http://www.irib.ir/worldservice/englishRADIO/ARCHIVE/INTER/i.htm>. Given that background, it wasn't difficult for Amir Taheri to market the hoax and others to buy it.
Also, a theocracy isn't the only one about which we hear stories like what Peter Tatchell is marketing now. Before and in the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, I heard a lot of stories about vicious oppression of gay men by Saddam Hussein in the then still more or less secular republic. We don't hear much about Saddam Hussein's oppression any more because now the story that needs to be sold is a pretext for "doing something" about Iran: Doug Ireland, "Iran Exports Anti-Gay Pogrom to Iraq," 31 May 2006: <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2659/>.
By and large, I don't think that writing sensational stories, holding vigils, etc. in the West would help women, gay men and lesbians, religious and ethnic minorities, etc. in Iran or other countries. Their rights can be better advanced within the context of advancing all working people's social and economic rights within a given country in the developing world. The defeat of "reformists" in the last election in Iran is a good example. They lost not because Iranians hated more personal liberties but because they implemented economic neoliberalism (as well as because they didn't make progress on political liberties). That's why I think Venezuela should be the model for Iran and other countries that have natural resources, though progress on women's rights in Venezuela, too, is slower than I would like.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't oversimplify my view on this.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>