The Huffington Post on Wednesday published a most distasteful hit job on my colleague Mehdi Khalaji. As readers of this blog are by now aware, Mehdi’s father, the Ayatollah Mohammed Taghi Khalaji, was arrested last week by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry for his criticism of the Islamic Republic’s actions against the Iranian people following last June’s fraudulent elections. No doubt, the regime also hoped to intimidate and silence Mehdi himself, who has used his perch in exile to shed enormous light on Iranian affairs, including the internal workings of the theocracy.

The essence of the HuffPo article, written by one Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, is as follows: Mehdi Khalaji sold his soul to the devil by leaving Iran, coming to the United States, and taking a job at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — which, as everyone knows, is a den of Zionist-loving neocons committed to the cause of war and destruction against the Iranian people. All of which, of course, should lead any correct-thinking person to the conclusion that Khalaji père got exactly what he deserved – a one-way ticket to the mullahs’ notorious Evin prison.

Set aside the slanders against Mehdi and the Washington Institute. Indeed, go ahead and assume them to be true if you want. What Sepahpour-Ulrich’s argument boils down to is that the alleged “sins” of the son must properly be visited upon the father. She actually quotes Confucius of all people to make her point clear for anyone who might have missed it: “The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.” No matter that the son is nearly 40 years old and an internationally established scholar in his own right. No matter that the father has never publicly commented on his son’s activities, much less endorsed them. No matter that the father’s sole transgression was to draw on his position of religious authority to speak out against the state’s unlawful acts of repression, detention, torture, and murder of his countrymen. Don’t you see? The father never publicly conformed to Stalinist ritual by publicly disowning his son or, better yet, luring him back home so that he could be betrayed into the hands of the regime for dispatch to Evin prison as well. So the old man must be guilty, guilty, guilty, Sepahpour-Ulrich would have us believe – and of treason, no less.

Sepahpour-Ulrich, of course, has the right to print such shameful drivel, and HuffPo obviously has the right to publish it. I nevertheless have to wonder about their editorial decision to serve as a platform for this brand of reprehensible discourse. A man’s life is at stake because he was prepared to stand up against the brutal machinery of a tyrannical theocracy and call it to account for violating its own constitution, the religious precepts on which its legitimacy is supposedly based, and the fundamental rights of millions of its own citizens. That sure sounds like a cause that an institution like HuffPo would rally behind under normal circumstances. After all, whatever differences the Left and Right in America may have about our country’s policy toward Iran, we all ought to be able to agree that what’s happened to Mohammed Taghi Khalaji — and perhaps to thousands more like him across Iran — is a travesty that is deserving of our condemnation and opposition, not our justification.

– John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national-security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.