Calls for ‘balance’ blunt the horrific human toll of rape and destruction in Israel-Hamas war

It should not be hard to categorically condemn Hamas terrorists’ depraved use of rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and girls.

And the idea that Israel could think that a ratio of two civilians killed for every Hamas fighter in Gaza would be a “tremendously positive” result is callous.

But raging disputes on both these issues underscore the extreme politicization of the conflict and, more importantly, threaten to downplay the inhumanity of a war exerting a horrific toll on defenseless civilians.

The first episode concerns Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who was forced on Tuesday to issue a long statement walking back her comments to CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that “horrific” rapes need to be “balanced” against civilian deaths in Gaza.

The second drama stems from comments by Israel Defense Forces spokesman Jonathan Conricus, also on CNN, about Palestinian civilian deaths that the lieutenant colonel was also forced to clarify.

The controversy over Jayapal’s remarks follows a period, predating the most recent Hamas attacks, in which some on the left have been criticized for seeming to be less inclined to condemn crimes against humanity carried out against Jews than other ethnic groups. And progressives across the Western world, many of whom are supportive of Palestinians, have sometimes been less strident than they might have been in trying to eradicate antisemitism.

Days of footage of the murderous Hamas rampage through kibbutz communities and grieving Palestinians pulling dead children from the rubble of their homes is hard to watch. But if the world tunes out, the reality of the carnage risks being overshadowed by arguments about the relative weight of horror suffered by either side or related diplomatic and political point-scoring typical of Middle East conflicts.

Emphatically condemning the evil…