Coverage of Israel/Palestine often attempts to make an extraordinarily lopsided conflict seem somehow more “balanced.” Take this line from the Washington Post (3/12/12)

The fighting has killed 18 Gazans, all but two of them militants, and disrupted the lives of about 1 million Israelis living within range of rocket fire.

Why would 18 people who were killed be compared to the disruption of daily life? If disruption is the standard, then one would have to determine how many Gazans have had their lives disrupted by power outages, drones, air strikes and so on.

A sentence like this would seem to be an attempt to “balance” a wildly imbalanced reality.

(One should always, of course, be skeptical of the word “militant” when applied to people killed by military forces; often it’s just a label applied to make their deaths seem acceptable.)