Mind you, I've never been raped, although I've feared it every day of my adult life. Still, these issues shouldn't require us to create and perpetuate a misleading definition for it. This is a religous war, and just like the middleast it's not going to be easy to settle.
Religion serves as another identifier of who is on what side.
The reason that Muslim nations all over the world have worked to get the Bosnian Muslims aid is because it took too long for anyone else to do so, and it's a way for contentious Muslim leaders, as in Iran, to claim that we are biased against Muslims. Lebanon is an even better example of this. The Shiites, for example, were generally poor, and demanded a greater say, but the Christians would not submit to greater participation by other groups. To dismiss the Middle East as a religious battleground obscures our own participation in the violence. Palestinians aren't fighting Jews only because they are Jews.