Finally, the left has found a ‘kidnap victim’ it cares about. Having spent more than two years making excuses for Hamas’s savage seizing of 251 Israelis, having violently torn down posters of those stolen Jews, now the activist class has suddenly decided that abduction is bad after all. Why? Because a dictator they admire, Nicolas Maduro, has been abducted by the United States.
What do we even say about people who get more agitated by the seizing of a 63-year-old corrupt ruler than they do by the abduction of a nine-month-old Jew? That was Kfir Bibas, kidnapped along with his mother and his four-year-old brother during Hamas’s carnival of fascist violence on 7 October 2023. They were later murdered. There is more fury in progressive circles over Trump’s nabbing of Maduro than there was over Hamas’s racist snatching of a literal baby.
In the US, leftists have hit the streets to chant ‘Free Maduro’. They furiously decry his ‘criminal abduction’. The British left is a hotbed of purple-prose anger over Trump’s ‘illegal’ abduction of a foreign leader. A huge question dangles precariously over every one of these ostentatious weepers for Maduro: where were you when Hamas criminally intruded into the Jewish State and kidnapped grandmothers, mothers, children? People who, unlike Maduro, were entirely innocent?
We are witnessing an orgy of hypocrisy of the like the world hasn’t seen in a long time
I’ll tell you where they were: they were attending protests that celebrated this mass seizure of Jews as an act of ‘resistance’. They were turning a blind eye as mobs of Jew-haters scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ across the faces of the kidnapped on posters in London, Berlin and New York. They were writing haughty thinkpieces branding the Jews of the Holy Land as ‘settler colonial’ usurpers of the ‘land of Palestine’. Shorter version: none of them are innocent.
The hypocrisy of the Maduro fanclub has really been brought home by the response of Hamas itself. It has slammed America’s ‘abduction’ of Maduro, calling it a ‘grave violation of international law’. Where to begin? These Nazi-lite kidnappers of more than 200 Jews really think they can lecture others about the immorality of cross-border abduction? These are hitherto untapped levels of cant. At least the US will treat Maduro with dignity, rather than starving and torturing him in an underground den.
Iran, too, has condemned the ‘illegal’ kidnapping of Maduro. Listen, if you send proxy armies of anti-Semites to kidnap Jews, and lock up young women for the crime of yearning for freedom, nobody wants to hear your thoughts on ‘criminal aggression’. China is calling on the US to free Maduro. How about you free the Uyghur people first from the iron fist of your ruthless ‘re-education’?
We are witnessing an orgy of hypocrisy of the like the world hasn’t seen in a long time. For more than two years our leafy universities were overrun by plummy activists justifying Hamas’s criminal invasion of Israel and seizure of its civilians. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, they said at George Washington University. ‘Globalise the intifada’, mobs chanted, because they wanted more of it: more assaults on Israel, more punishment for those ‘settler-colonialist’ scum.
This Israelophobic hysteria was an expressly lawless, anti-sovereignty and even pro-abduction movement. Excuses were made for Hamas’s violation of Israeli sovereignty. The entire idea of Jewish sovereignty was rubbished. ‘From the river to the sea’, millions chanted, advertising their bigoted belief that the Jewish state should be erased. These same people now think they can bash America for briefly intruding into Venezuela? Not on my watch.
There is much talk of a ‘dangerous precedent’ being set by Trump’s actions in Venezuela. I would argue that the truly reckless precedent was set in the aftermath of 7 October, when vast swathes of the West’s intellectuals, activists, educators and students made clear their belief that violently violating sovereignty and abducting foreigners is sometimes justified. They revelled in the lawless savagery of Iran’s racist proxies and now bemoan Trump’s alleged law-breaking.
I remember being in numerous media discussions about 7 October where the other person would flamboyantly refuse to condemn Hamas. ‘I will not play that media game’, they’d say. But it wasn’t a game. All we were saying in the wake of that worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust is that good people should reassert the value of human life, the rights of Jewish sovereignty and the importance of non-aggression across borders. And yet many failed to do that. They flat-out refused to.
To my mind, these people sacrificed their right to an opinion on issues of war and sovereignty. They sacrificed it at the altar of their unhinged loathing for the Jewish nation. Let’s put it like this: if you spent two-and-a-half years agitating for the destruction of the sovereign Jewish state, then we couldn’t give a toss what you think about America’s two-and-a-half hours inside Venezuela.
