I know a Persian dissident, a journalist and writer who was in jail there and only got out (and to Germany, where he's currently part of the P.E.N.'s writers in exile program) because our goverment is in dialogue with Iran, which gave them some leverage. Dialogue doesn't mean you let crap like Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denying or his general antisemitic rethoric slide, on the contrary. So yes, hearing early on that Obama understands this was very encouraging.