Is there any terrorist regime whose talking points the Washington Post won't echo?

If so, the Iranian regime isn't one of them.

Not content with being a mouthpiece for the Gaza Ministry of Health — in other words, Hamas — the Washington Post is now shilling for the Iranian regime. Hence, the Post’s front-page story on how “civilians” died when Israel bombed Iran’s Evin prison where the regime stashes and tortures political prisoners.

The Post’s story opens by quoting a “former prisoner” who says he dreamed that one day the gates of the prison would “come crashing down,” but found the actual event to be “nightmarish.” “Everything was rubble, “ he complained.

The Iranian people haven’t made the former prisoner’s dream come true. The Israelis have. How did he imagine they could accomplish this without leaving lots of rubble?

The Post then proceeds to quote Iranian officials who say that 71 people were killed in the Israeli attack on the infamous prison. Absent from the Post’s report are the standard disclaimers the paper uses when it cites information from the Israeli government, e.g., “the government provided no proof” that 71 people were killed.

As it does with Hamas, the Post apparently finds the Iranian regime more credible than the Israeli government.

The Post goes on to say:

According to online death notices and internal prison records examined by The Post, along with interviews, the dead included 43 prison staff members and two conscripted soldiers who were stationed there. At least four other civilians who did not work at the prison were killed, two of them children, The Post found.

The Post does not tell us how it obtained internal prison records (did the regime supply them?), whom it interviewed (regime sources?), or how it knows whether the adult civilians did not work at the prison. On its face, though, these numbers suggest a targeted strike that was successful in taking out prison officials and soldiers while sparing prisoners and, for the most part, civilians.

If two children were killed, that’s tragic. So too, if civilians with no complicity in the regime’s oppression perished. But the extent of this “collateral damage” is small compared to what often occurs in strikes that target non-civilians, including strikes by the U.S.

And the real story here is that this attack, like all of Israel’s strikes on Iran, did not target ordinary civilians. Iran pounded Israeli civilians for almost two weeks for no purpose other than to kill them (successfully in about 30 cases); to injure them (successfully in about 3,500 cases); and to disrupt their lives (with thorough success, according to my wife’s relatives who live in Israel). Israel never responded in kind.

Where’s the Washington Post report about that?

It is fair, though, to ask why Israel bombed Evin prison? As far as I know, it is not a military target, per se, and almost certainly has no connection to Iran’s nuclear program.

The facile answer — because Israel could — is partially true. I view this attack as part of a campaign to show the regime that it can hit targets of significance to the mullahs at will.

But there’s more to it than that. Evin prison is a symbol of the mullah’s fearsome power. The Israeli strike was therefore a demonstration of the regime’s impotence in the face of Israeli power.

In this regard, the strike might well have been an attempt by Israel to align itself with Iranian dissidents and to give hope to non-dissidents who nonetheless hate the regime (quite possibly a majority of Iranians).

It’s far from clear that the strike will have these effects to any appreciable degree. However, the regime’s attempt, aided by the Washington Post, to make Israel the villain of this piece (the attack supposedly was “nightmarish” even from the perspective of a former prisoner) suggests that Israel had good reason to think that going after the prison would worry the mullahs.

What’s sad, but not surprising, is that it also bothered the Washington Post.