Sexual violence in war is a crime — no matter who perpetuates it

You probably know that Japan sexually enslaved about 200,000 Korean women between 1932 and the end of World War II.

But you might not know that Soviet soldiers raped an estimated two million German women in the last years of the conflict. And I doubt you know that American GIs raped 14,000 women in Western Europe and tens of thousands of others in Asia during the same war.

Call it the double standard of wartime sexual crimes. When they are perpetrated by our own side — or by a side we support — we tend to turn a blind eye. And that’s a crime in its own right.

Witness the resounding suspicion, equivocation, and outright denial that followed reports of rapes by Hamas fighters during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Left-wing critics in the West simply dismissed the evidence or claimed that Israel fabricated it. And even women’s rights groups were slow to acknowledge the horrific sexual violence that occurred on that day.

Last week, a United Nations envoy focusing on sexual violence confirmed that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture” on Oct. 7. She noted accounts of gang rapes, of people being killed while being raped, and of corpses being raped — all by Hamas.

And the left shrugged.

That insults Palestinians, of course, by holding them to a lower moral standard. And it ignores the suffering and trauma of their victims, who did nothing — let’s repeat, nothing — to deserve being raped.

Alas, that’s a lesson we keep forgetting. The West was reluctant to acknowledge Soviet rapes in World War II because the USSR was an ally and Adolf Hitler started the conflict. So anything that occurred in it — even the sexual assault of German women — was somehow the Germans’ own fault.

Criticizing Soviet rapists also seemed to confirm Nazi propaganda about Russians as barbarous “Asiatics,” who were allegedly inferior to “Aryan” Germans. In wartime, the last thing you want to do is give credence to the enemy’s lies. So you’ll downplay or deny any charges of wrongdoing against your side, even when they’re true.

That’s what seems to be happening in the controversy over Oct. 7. The reports of sexual violence by Hamas echo the most malicious stereotypes about Palestinians: that they’re violent, savage, and subhuman. No good-hearted person wants to perpetuate that kind of hate. So in the name of fighting prejudice against Palestinians, Israel’s critics keep quiet about sexual assault against Israelis.

That makes the real victims — women — into props, not people. If their fate doesn’t fit the broader morality play that you’re telling, you can simply push them off the stage.

That’s also why we rarely talk about sexual assaults by U.S. soldiers during World War II. It was the “Good War,” after all, fought by the “Greatest Generation” of Americans. How could they have raped innocent women?

Call it the double standard of wartime sexual crimes. When they are perpetrated by our own side — or by a side we support — we tend to turn a blind eye.

But they did. In Germany, where the U.S. military barred servicemen from “fraternization” with local women, rape wasn’t considered a violation of that rule. According to one American commander, “copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternization.”

American soldiers helped liberate France from Germany in 1944. But they also raped hundreds of French women, egged on by lurid reports in the American press. Life magazine called France “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists.” When women defied that stereotype — and resisted American soldiers’ sexual advances — the soldiers took what they wanted.

The situation was even worse in the war’s Pacific theater. According to one estimate, American soldiers raped 10,000 women on the island of Okinawa alone. During the U.S. military occupation of Japan, meanwhile, rape became so common that Japanese officials established a network of brothels to serve American servicemen. When a venereal disease outbreak led to the closing of the brothels, rapes by U.S. soldiers shot up from 40 to 330 per day.

That doesn’t take anything away from the righteousness or heroism of the American war against fascism. Instead, it reminds us that people on the right side of history can also commit terribly wrong acts.

Likewise, condemning the Hamas rapes doesn’t invalidate the Palestinian campaign for freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It simply means that wartime sexual assault is evil and inexcusable, no matter the circumstances. When we prorate our response to it, in accord with our politics, we forfeit the victims’ humanity. And our own.