Opinion of the Court
(emphasis added). Considering the FSIA “as a whole,” there is “nothing to suggest we should read” §1604 to apply to criminal proceedings. Samantar, 560 U. S., at 319.
In sum, Halkbank’s narrow focus on §1604 misses the forest for the trees (and a single tree at that). Halkbank’s §1604 argument reduces to the implausible contention that Congress enacted a statute focused entirely on civil actions and then in one provision that does not mention criminal proceedings somehow stripped the Executive Branch of all power to bring domestic criminal prosecutions against instrumentalities of foreign states. On Halkbank’s view, a purely commercial business that is directly and majority-owned by a foreign state could engage in criminal conduct affecting U. S. citizens and threatening U. S. national security while facing no criminal accountability at all in U. S. courts. Nothing in the FSIA supports that result.
B
Halkbank advances three additional reasons why this Court should read the FSIA to immunize foreign states and their instrumentalities from criminal proceedings. None is persuasive.
First, Halkbank emphasizes this Court’s statement in a 1989 case that the FSIA is the “sole basis for obtaining jurisdiction over a foreign state in federal court.” Amerada Hess, 488 U. S., at 439. But Amerada Hess was not a criminal case. Rather, it was a civil case brought under the Alien Tort Statute and under the federal courts’ general admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. Id., at 432 (citing 28 U. S. C. §§1333, 1350). This Court has often admonished that “general language in judicial opinions” should be read “as referring in context to circumstances similar to the circumstances then before the Court and not referring to quite different circumstances that the Court was not then considering.” Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U. S. 419, 424 (2004). Amerada Hess made clear that the FSIA displaces general
