Feminist Khamenei, well, not quite yet

The best way to hit two birds with one stone is to run down your opponent for their well-established faults, while keeping quiet about one's own faults in the same department. The first and only user of atomic weapons does it all the time with other countries with nuclear arsenal. But Iran's theocratic leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, displayed renewed talent on Wednesday when he held a meeting with a group of women in Tehran. While decrying Westernisation and Western values - nothing new here - Khamenei propped himself up as a women's rights activist. Well, almost.

Westerners, he said, 'brazenly claim to be advocates of women's rights, while women are still subjected to slavery and sex trafficking, among other abuses, in those societies, where the governments have also legalised homosexuality', adding how 'in many Western countries, women receive lower wages than men for the same job'. The brilliant bit about this diatribe is that nothing in what he said about the West is untrue.

But what was breathtaking is the leader of the country that legally places women as second-class citizens and subservient to men - the Iranian protests and the subsequent sentences meted out to protesters that have included death aren't a clash of fashion statements - is giving the gyan. Nothing like when hypocrisy is thrown up to cover hypocrisy.