At long last, some good news from Iran reaches U.S. shores. Akbar Ganji, one of Iran's leading advocates for democratic change, will arrive in the U.S. today. More than his arrival, it is his survival that should count as a small miracle: No one in Iran has so boldly broken political taboos and lived to tell the tale. Mr. Ganji has denounced the country's rulers as members of a fascist regime and, borrowing the famous words that Ayatollah Khomeini used to address the Shah, has said that Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei "must go!" Now, from July 14 to 16, he has called for a three-day hunger strike before the U.N. headquarters in New York City to demand the release of all political prisoners, including the two key figures Mansour Ossanloo and Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini.

Messrs. Ossanloo and Mousavi Khoini were arrested during two of the most dramatic displays of dissent in Iran's recent history. Last month, several thousand women took to the streets of Tehran protesting their unequal status under a constitution which gives them no right to divorce and deems the value of a woman's testimony in the courtroom as half of a man's. Many demonstrators were rounded up, and Tehran's former parliamentarian Mousavi Khoini, a key supporter, was arrested on site and remains in prison. This year there was also a major strike by Tehran's bus union workers. It shut down transportation in the capital for several days, but was brutally quashed by the regime. The leader of the bus syndicate, Mr. Ossanloo, has been kept in detention without consistent access to his attorneys.

Minorities have come under vehement attack. Last May, several hundred thousand ethnic Turks, inflamed by a cartoon in which a cockroach was portrayed speaking Turkish, demanded formal recognition of their language, and the permission to create Turkish language newspapers and television broadcasts. The demonstrations caused martial law to be declared in several major provinces of Azarbaijan. Hundreds were arrested, and several died or have disappeared. Azeri activists with legitimate civil demands have been accused of being separatists provoked by the United States. Iranian Kurds who took to the streets for similar reasons last year were vehemently confronted by the regime and two of their leaders were arrested.

Members of the Sufi faith have been forced out of their places of worship; according to the U.N.'s special rapporteur on religious minorities, the supreme leader has issued an executive order to identify and monitor the activities of the Bahai community members that is intended to ultimately create a national registry -- borrowing a page from the Nazi book.

For Mr. Ganji, more formidable than the regime itself will be the challenge of garnering the support of the Iranian diaspora elite. Some of the most outspoken advocates of Iranian human rights have refused to answer Mr. Ganji's call to a hunger strike, arguing that to do so would be to strengthen the hands of the American neoconservatives. This very argument was made when Mr. Ganji himself was on the verge of death -- and those who were advocating on his behalf found themselves abandoned by their most natural allies.

For a man with so profound a penchant for heady debates -- Mr. Ganji made a pilgrimage to Jurgen Habermas and Shmuel Eisenstadt while in Germany, and plans to meet with Richard Rorty in Stanford -- this should be a welcome intellectual feat. After all, to give America precedence and to subordinate an issue so dire, so profoundly indigenous to Iranians as civil liberties and human rights, would be another, though most bizarre, exercise in orientalism by the very people who claim to want to save Iran from the colonialists.

To date, one of Mr. Ganji's most significant allies has been the international community and Western NGOs who championed his case. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for the extradition of Tehran's notorious judge, Saeed Mortazavi, who had brazenly been sent to Geneva to represent Iran at the inaugural session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Mr. Mortazavi is credited, among numerous other heinous crimes, with ending the greatest journalistic renaissance in Iranian history by shutting down hundreds of print journals, and has been one of Mr. Ganji's supreme nemeses for several years. The incident brought about the abrupt flight of Mr. Mortazavi from Geneva and did an astounding service for Iranians, who, besieged by a sense of abandonment by the international community, have come to believe that their suffering is of no consequence to the world. Mr. Mortazavi's disgraced return to Iran is being hailed as one of the pro-democracy movement's greatest victories in recent months.

The world is right to take the threat of Iran seriously. But it is wrong to trace the root of that threat to a bomb that has yet to exist. The real threat of the Iranian regime is in the way it has invented and executed its own brand of justice. According to their perverted interpretation, murdering others to advance the greater cause is not wrong. That definition of justice has allowed Iran to violate the rights of its own citizens, as well as to begin to cultivate global aspirations.

If President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the audacity to deny the Holocaust, it is because he has successfully managed to deny the ongoing suffering inside his own country. To fight denial no weapon can ever be more powerful than remembrance. To keep a record of atrocities committed against Iranians and to declare the perpetrators, among them several sitting ministers, persona non grata in the international community, would be a major contribution by the international community to the cause of democracy in Iran.

Of all the roles that Mr. Ganji has played -- revolutionary, journalist, reformist, prisoner -- the most crucial today is that of a ghost: The ghost of the many prisoners who did not survive as he has, and the hundreds of voiceless Iranians who might not survive if, smitten by celebrity or lured by other ambitions, Mr. Ganji loses focus and forsakes them.