Iran versus Arab countries

I saw an Iranian professor from the University of Tehran speak on RT news.  He prefaced his remarks by saying: I am not particularly a fan of Ahmadinajad.  I thought to myself: with all the noise that hypocritical Western governments make about the lack of democracy in Iran (and Iran is not a democracy for sure and its regime is repressive indeed): if a professor at any Arab university outside of Lebanon made that remark about the leader of that country, he would lose his job instantly and would be punished for sure.  This is what people in the West don't understand: people in the Middle East don't measure the Iranian political system by the standards of Swedish democracy but by the standards of governments in the Middle East.