It takes a very special skill to attend an educational event bringing attention to Hamas’ misogynistic and murderous sexual assault of Israeli women during its genocidal October 7 massacre in southern Israel, and turn it into an anti-Israel hit piece. However, that’s exactly what Jen Zoratti managed to accomplish in her January 26 opinion column in the Winnipeg Free Press entitled: “The battlefield between feminism and rapes of war.”

Zoratti, a columnist at the newspaper, reported on a January 24 event held in Winnipeg called Hear Our Voices, a program aimed at raising awareness about Hamas’ sexual crimes during their October 7 massacre. While Zoratti described details of Hamas’ attacks as “harrowing,” she soon launched into an extended exercise in downplaying the suffering faced by Israeli women.

After saying that “rape and gender-based violence has long been used as a tool of war,” and citing instances of such crimes being used by soldiers in different armed forces, Zoratti wrote that such violence “rarely falls neatly on the sides of ‘good’ guys and ‘bad’ guys because war is hell and in hell everyone is capable of being a monster.”

Though this finding is ostensibly news to Zoratti, the differences between Hamas and Israel could not be starker. 

Hamas is a genocidal Islamic terrorist group which not only murders innocent civilians, but tortures and rapes them in methods too horrific to even comprehend, including murdering women while they are still being raped, cutting off their breasts and genitals with a knife and playing with the tissue, and shooting women in their reproductive organs.

Almost incomprehensibly, these Hamas terrorists filmed many of their exploits for posterity, clearly proud of their actions.

No person of sound mind could learn of Hamas’ barbarism and put it in the same category as Israel, a liberal democratic state which seeks to protect its people against such inhuman monsters, and which – even while fighting Hamas in Gaza, takes unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties.

Any observer who cannot discern the difference between Hamas and Israel is either profoundly ignorant of Hamas’ ideology and crimes, or worse yet, lacking even a scintilla of moral compass. 

Zoratti criticized the event’s unvarnished exposing of Hamas’ sexual crimes, writing that it “veered into agitprop,” or political propaganda, borrowing from a Soviet term, adding that the event was just “further exploitation of women’s bodies to drive a political agenda and justify violence.” 

In fact, Zoratti’s inability to unambiguously recognize and subsequently condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes without pivoting to another agenda shows the exact need to bring attention to the rapes and sexual torture that took place on October 7. Over the last four months, anti-Israel detractors have attempted to deny or otherwise minimize the heinous nature of Hamas’ attacks, labeling them exaggerated or entirely fabricated.

Zoratti ended her column by writing that “feminists need to speak up — and call for a ceasefire now.” While superficially appealing, a ceasefire by Israel is little different than a complete capitulation and surrender to Hamas, a group that has loudly proclaimed that it will never stop murdering innocent Israeli civilians as long as it exists.

Not only does Zoratti’s puerile call for a ceasefire ignore the existence of a ceasefire prior to October 7 – broken when Hamas invaded Israel – it also sends the unmistakable message to any perpetrators of sexual violence against women anywhere in the world: that no matter how horrific your crime, you can get away with it.

Joining other moral relativists who seek to deny or downplay Hamas’ torture and rape of Israeli women, Jen Zoratti’s recent column, by seeking to hijack this suffering to promulgate an anti-Israel agenda, is utterly contemptible.