

You’d think that if you had to jump through that many hoops to invite someone to your country, mayyyybe a few alarm bells should ring in your head. But no, Merz is an expert at mental gymnastics and will gladly invite a war criminal before he considers rethinking his position.
If anything it would be more a ‘tu quoque’ fallacy than whataboutism, because the latter tries to shift the attention to an unrelated topic, whereas here it is occupying land both times.
It certainly weakens the criticism, because the robber in your example might do the right thing, but if they really opposed robbing, surely they wouldn’t do it themselves? As you said, it makes them a hypocrite, and makes you question their motive for measuring two cases with a different yardstick.