Lately, I have been noticing how quickly people change their standards depending on who they are talking about.

That was on full display when news broke on January 3 that Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been forcibly apprehended in Venezuela after twenty years in power. The language was familiar enough: justice, law, sovereignty, human rights. But the outrage shifted very quickly.

And honestly, the reaction told its own story.

Venezuela and the Sovereignty Debate

I could not help noticing how quickly people rushed to defend sovereignty. Then I came across a post by Mitchell Schneider that said, more directly than most, what a lot of people seemed to be missing:

“Because of Venezuela, everyone is suddenly an expert on sovereignty. Let me tell you what sovereignty actually means under international law, because I don’t think most people screaming about it have any idea.

‘Sovereignty’ isn’t about who controls the land with guards, guns, and ammunition. If it were, every warlord with a checkpoint would be a ‘sovereign.’ Every drug cartel would be sovereign. Every terrorist organization holding land would be sovereign.

Sovereignty requires not only ‘effective control,’ but also an assessment of the extent to which that control represents the will of the people and supports their well-being. International recognition and adherence to international obligations are shorthand for laws that embody human rights and the welfare of the governed. These are corollaries to the main principle.

Nicolás Maduro may have had military control, but he lacked the other three requirements.

The will of the people? Maduro lost the July 2024 election by a margin of two to one. The Carter Center confirmed it. The opposition released tally sheets from more than 80 percent of voting machines. Maduro declared victory anyway.

Adherence to international obligations and human rights? After he seized power, Maduro imprisoned roughly 1,700 political opponents, including children; disappeared untold thousands; forcibly shut down opposition voices; and forced María Corina Machado—recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—into hiding for fear of her life. For years, he also presided over the Cartel de los Soles from the presidential palace: a narco-terrorist operation that flooded American streets with cocaine.”

That gets to the heart of it.

The United States did not invade Venezuela. It executed a long-standing arrest warrant against a man widely seen as having lost an election, refused to leave office, and ruled through repression. Yet so much of the outrage was aimed not at Maduro’s record, but at the supposed violation of his sovereignty.

That is what I find so revealing.

The Double Standard

Schneider also said something else that, to me, is impossible to brush aside:

“Here is what makes this so infuriating. Many of the same voices rushing to defend Maduro’s ‘sovereignty’ have spent years insisting that Israel has no right to defend itself when Hamas fires rockets from Gaza, when Hezbollah launches missiles from Lebanon, or when Iran builds drone factories in Venezuela to manufacture weapons that kill Israeli civilians. But Venezuela’s sovereignty is sacred; the sovereignty of Israel, apparently, does not exist. The double standard is not subtle, and it is not kind. But thank God, some members of the public still retain the ability to articulate moral clarity.”

That is the part I find hardest to ignore.

Venezuela’s sovereignty suddenly becomes sacred, while Israel’s right to defend itself is treated as conditional, debatable, or somehow less real. At a certain point, it stops looking like principle and starts looking like selective outrage.

I think a lot of people see that, even if they do not always say it out loud.

Power and Legitimacy

President Trump does not sugarcoat things, and that bluntness shows up in foreign policy, too. Maduro is now in U.S. federal custody. Assad fled to Moscow. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran have all taken real hits, while Russia has been warned.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, one point stands out: occupying a presidential palace does not make a ruler legitimate.

Power is not the same thing as legitimacy.

You cannot call it justice just because it is wrapped in legal language.

What the Media Leaves Out

This moment also points to something larger. The media does not simply report stories. It shapes them.

HonestReporting puts it well:

“Visual storytelling shapes perception just as powerfully as headlines, and omissions can be as revealing as what is included. This matters because editorial choices are rarely neutral. Year-end photo roundups are often presented as objective snapshots of the world, but they reflect deliberate decisions about which conflicts dominate, which images stir emotion, and which stories quietly disappear.”

As HonestReporting demonstrates in this video, these omissions are not accidental. They are editorial decisions, and they play a powerful role in shaping global public opinion and elections.

 

That point matters.

What gets shown matters. What gets left out matters too. The images people see, the stories editors amplify, the ones they minimize, the faces they return to again and again, all of that shapes public opinion.

And no, I do not think those omissions are always accidental.

Can We Judge a Culture?

This question of storytelling goes beyond journalism.

Professor Gad Saad recently pointed to a new book, The Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, that takes another look at Margaret Mead’s work on Samoa and the problems at its core. Her work helped spread the idea that cultures should be treated as beyond judgment.

 

I do not agree.

Cultures are different, yes. But that does not mean they are beyond criticism. Human beings still share certain needs. Children need protection. Families need stability. Communities need some way to restrain cruelty, selfishness, and chaos. Societies need standards, not just slogans.

So I think it is fair to ask hard questions.

Do the values of a culture promote fairness? Do they protect the vulnerable? Do they encourage responsibility? Do they make life more stable, decent, and humane?

Those are not hateful questions. They are necessary ones.

Jewish Sources Still Matter

It is also worth remembering how much of the West’s moral vocabulary grew out of Jewish sources.

Christianity and Islam both drew heavily from Jewish texts and ideas. The Torah, the Talmud, and centuries of Jewish learning have shaped not only Jewish communities and the State of Israel, but much of the Western moral world as well, whether people realize it or not.

What I have always appreciated about the Talmud is how grounded it is. It is not abstract for the sake of sounding lofty. It is deeply concerned with everyday life: law, family, responsibility, justice, debate, duty, and care for others.

How do we raise children?
How do we protect the vulnerable?
How do we pursue justice?
How do we build a society worth living in?

These are ancient questions, but they do not feel ancient at all.

What Keeps Me Grounded

We all understand physical needs. We know we need food, rest, movement, and care. But people also need meaning, direction, and something that helps them feel steady.

More and more, we are hearing about young people returning to churches, looking for meaning and community. I can understand that. A lot of people today seem to be searching for something that feels real and steady.

I understand that.

For me, synagogue on Sabbath morning gives me that sense of steadiness, whether I am in Montreal or Jerusalem. It reminds me that life is bigger than whatever outrage is dominating the headlines that week.

And maybe that is why this matters to me as much as it does.

Because beneath the politics, beneath the media framing, beneath the debates over sovereignty and law, there is still a deeper question: what kind of world are we trying to sustain?

What This Is Really About

In the end, this is not only about Maduro. And it is not only about Trump, media bias, or the idea that some values are off-limits to criticism.

It is about whether we are willing to be consistent. And it is about whether we still know the difference between power and legitimacy, and between justice and selective outrage.

It is also about whether we are paying attention to the stories we are being told, and the ones we are being encouraged to ignore.

The values we defend, the hypocrisies we excuse, and the truths we are willing to face say far more about us than any slogan ever will.

That is the question I keep coming back to.