When dictators are called out by the international community for perpetrating human-rights abuses, they often attempt to deflect criticism by accusing their Western critics of hypocrisy. In April, for instance, China denounced the US State Department’s annual Country Report on Beijing’s human-rights practices as “a pretense the U.S. government uses to cover up its agenda of seeking hegemony” over such nations as Afghanistan. “The U.S. should immediately cease making irresponsible remarks,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian. “Instead, it needs to reflect on itself, mend its ways, and work earnestly to improve its own human-rights situation.”

In substance, these attempts at moral equivalence lack credibility. But they can have the appearance of truth when our adversaries base their propaganda on self-incriminating statements made by the West’s own media figures and politicians.

This week, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took the rostrum at the United Nations General Assembly to deliver Iran’s habitual denunciations of Western “double standards.” While anti-hijab protests rocked numerous Iranian cities in the wake of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, Raisi went through a predictable laundry list of complaints, accusing Israel of creating the “world’s largest prison” in Gaza, and denouncing US detention policies at the Mexican border. But he also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”