Last month, as part of its illegal, U.S.-supported bombing campaign against Iran, Israel attacked the notorious Evin prison in Tehran, a “a sprawling complex that holds thousands of prisoners and has been a symbol of the Iranian regime’s repression for more than four decades.” Israel said the attack was “symbolic,” but what it was meant to symbolize is unclear. The Times of Israel says it “was widely taken as a signal that Israel was expanding its targets to symbols of the regime, after an initial focus on military and nuclear targets.” But if an authoritarian regime imprisons dissidents, attacking its prison is likely to kill the captive dissidents rather than undercut the regime. Evin is “used to house political prisoners who dare show dissent to the country's Islamist regime.” We are now learning of the horrific consequences of Israel’s strike. The New York Times reports that “prisoners, families, activists and lawyers said that Israel’s action had shown total disregard for the lives and safety of the prisoners.” Horrendously, Israel appears to have killed a huge number of transgender inmates, whose gender identity is criminalized in Iran: About 100 transgender inmates are missing after their section of the prison was flattened, and the authorities say they are presumed dead, said Reza Shafakhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, who added that the government often treats being transgender as a crime. The Times report is horrendous. A social worker took her 5-year-old son to work with her at the prison because she hadn’t found childcare. After an initial explosion, she went to look for him. Then another explosion killed her. Then falling debris killed her son. Four other social workers were killed. The local “morgue was using DNA tests to identify body parts and corpses burned beyond recognition.” The Times says the attack on the prison, which appears to have been deliberately targeted, was described by the Israeli foreign minister as “both retaliation for Iranian missile strikes on civilian structures, and somehow an act of liberation.” The idea that you can liberate people by bombing them is a persistent feature of both U.S. and Israeli propaganda. In fact, bombing often strengthens the regime in power, because it causes people to hate the country dropping bombs on it and set aside their disagreements with the government for the sake of national unity. (This was Hitler’s miscalculation about the Blitz. He thought it would demoralize Britons, when it in fact unified them against him.) Noam Chomsky and I have written about how anti-Taliban Afghans hated the U.S. bombing in 2001, and pleaded with the Bush administration to stop creating hideous civilian carnage. It should not be any surprise, then, that Nobel Peace Prize winning Iranian dissident Narges Mohammadi said that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran actually dealt a blow against pro-democratic forces in Iran, saying it would lead to further repression. Israel and the U.S. often cast themselves as liberators, rather than purely self-interested. Amazingly, Israeli soldiers in Gaza have actually hoisted LGBTQ pride flags over the destroyed wreckage of the strip: But it should be obvious that attacking and destroying civilian infrastructure in no way helps LGBTQ people under a homophobic regime. In fact, it kills the very people who are ostensibly being helped. But “destroying the village in order to save it” is a classic part of U.S. military doctrine. Now the transgender inmates of Iran’s brutal prison have received a lesson in how the U.S. and Israel will “help” them.
