Kidnapping is wrong, except for Jewish civilians and children. Kidnapping them is fine. That’s the only takeaway from the disparate responses to the mass kidnappings of civilians and children on October 7, 2023 and the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife by US forces over the weekend.
Don’t expect the people who went around ripping down and tearing up the posters of the Israeli hostages and drawing Hitler mustaches on kidnapped Jewish toddlers to act the same with Maduro. They are far more likely to be protesting against Maduro’s arrest and trial. Jewish children are Hitler, you see, while corrupt socialist dictators are innocents.
International law is apparently nothing more than a tool to protect dictators with the blood of countless people on their hands, not a tool to protect innocent people, or at least not Jews.
Case in point:
UN “Special Rapporteur" Francesca Albanese, who called Maduro’s arrest “a lethal blow" to international law. She is far more animated and concerned with protecting Maduro, who violated human rights on a massive scale for over a decade, than with protecting the innocents and the children who were abducted by Hamas. Her response to the mass slaughter and the mass kidnappings in southern Israel was not to appeal to international law on behalf of the victims, but to Tweet on October 7, as the massacre was ongoing, that 'Today’s violence must be put in context.’
We need to "understand" the people who murder and kidnap Jewish babies. There’s a “context" to that, you see, because they are Jews, and that makes it all right. There is apparently no “context" to Maduro’s capture, because whatever his crimes, he is not a Jew. That makes it wrong to kidnap him.
35 of the kidnapping victims were children under the age of 18, including Avigayil Idan (3 years old), Emily Hand (9), Ofri (10), Yuval (9), and Uriya Brodetz (5), Ariel (4) and Kfir Bibas (9 months), Ohad Munder (8), Hila Rotem (12), Agam (17), Gal (11), and Tal Goldstein-Almog (9), Ella (8) and Dafna Elyakim (15), Yagil (12), and Or Yaakov (16), Yuval Engel (10), Amit Shani (16), Ofir Engel (17), Yahel (3), and Naveh Shoham (8), Noam Avigdori (12), Emilia Aloni (5), twins Yuli and Emma Cunio (3), Eitan Yahalomi (12), Sahar (16) and Erez Calderon (12), Raz (4) and Aviv Asher (2), Aisha Zaidna(17), Mia Lemberg (17), Noam (17) and Alma Or (13), and Gali Tarshansky (13).
Where was Albanese’s vaunted “international law" when these teenagers, children, toddlers, and babies needed it? Why did their kidnappers deserve “context" when those who arrested Maduro do not?
Albanese rushed to write a book defending Hamas immediately after these children were abducted, co-opting a phrase made famous in one of the most explosive antisemitic episodes of the 19th century, “J’Accuse." Two months after the massacre, she condemned a call on Hamas to release all of the hostages, including all of the children, “unacceptable."
It was an act of such monstruous evil that it is still shocking over two years later.
Don’t expect any such condemnations of calls on the US to release Maduro. It is unacceptable to demand the release of babies in diapers as long as those babies are Jewish. But is it perfectly acceptable to demand the release of mass murderers who are not Jewish.
Kfir Bibas was 10 months old and his brother Ariel was 4 years od when they were murdered in cold blood by their captors. Kfir had not learned to walk or talk. He and his brother were never put on trial, nor could they have been. Their lives were snuffed out by monsters who declared themselves to be the judge, jury, and executioners of all Jews for the crime of being born Jews.
But since Albanese’s version of “international law" allows the kidnapping and murder of Jews, it is far worse for Maduro to be tried in an actual court of law for crimes he actually committed than it is for Jewish children to be kidnapped and murdered before their first birthday.
Spare us your crocodile tears. Any “law" that condemns the punishment of mass murderers and protects brutal dictators while abandoning and allowing the kidnapping and murder of children and babies who are born into the “wrong" ethnicity is no law. It is pure evil. It is barbarism pretending to be law.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.