The body of a motorist lies on a road following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel October 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Yale University’s flagship campus newspaper apologized on Tuesday for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas raping and beheading Israelis during its Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state.
“Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 25: This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men,” the Yale Daily News wrote in a statement at the bottom of a column by sophomore Sahar Tartak.
The article in question lambasted Yalies4Palestine (Y4P), a pro-Palestinian campus group, for defending and seemingly applauding Hamas’ assault on Israel. Published on Oct. 12, the column was later censored to no longer include a portion describing reports and eyewitness accounts of Hamas raping and beheading Israeli civilians.
Hamas murdered over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, injured thousands more, and kidnapped over 200 people as hostages during its terrorist onslaught on Oct. 7 — the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The brutality of Hamas’ attacks — which, according to copious and publicly verified documentation, included rape, torture, and the beheading of babies — has shocked the world.
Following widespread backlash to the editor’s note, Yale Daily News editor-in-chief Anika Seth published a statement explaining and apologizing for the editorial decision. She began by saying the News “failed to ensure” the statements about rape and beheadings were “properly cited and attributed,” arguing that at the time of initial publication, claims of those specific forms of violence by Hamas on Oct. 7 “were not independently confirmed” by the source cited in the column. The News then “published corrections” modeled on reporting and corrections from other media outlets earlier in the month.
“The News was wrong to publish the corrections. By the time of the first correction on Oct. 25, there had been widely reported coverage from outlets such as Reuters publicly verifying that Hamas raped and beheaded Israelis,” Seth wrote. “These corrections erroneously created the impression that, as of late October, there still was not enough publicly available evidence for those horrific acts. The News therefore retracts those editor’s notes in their entirety and without qualification. The notes have been removed from the columns, and the original text has been restored.”
Seth went on to say that it was never the newspaper’s intention to “minimize” the brutality of Hamas’ assault on Israel, adding, “We are sorry for any unintended consequences to our readership and will ensure that such erroneous and damaging material does not make it into our content, either as opinion or as news.”
Tartak said on X/Twitter that the decision to restore her original article does not “make the initial change any less insidious.”
The News came under heavy fire this week by alumni who accused it of hypocrisy for choosing to discredit reports of rape made by Israeli women after publishing several accounts of sexual assault and harassment that were never challenged in a court of law.
“It defies belief that this editorial board would therefore characterize claims of rape during the Hamas attack as ‘unsubstantiated’ in the face of ample substantiation in news outlets,” Yale alumni Chris Michel and Elyssa Friedland wrote in a letter to the paper. “And it shocks the conscience that a generation of students who implore us to ‘believe women’ who allege rape is suddenly willing to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes when the women raped are Israeli.”
Yale University alumnus and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, who recently wrote a book examining the history the US-Israel relationship, tweeted, “Does anyone ever get the feeling that Ivy League admissions departments and faculty search committees aren’t as good at their jobs as they should be?”
Yale has been no stranger to controversy since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7.
As Hamas invaded Israel and the world learned of the atrocities it committed against civilians, Yale professor Zareena Grewal — who teaches “American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, and Religious Studies” — said that Palestinians had “every right” to target Israelis through “armed struggle.”
“Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine,” she tweeted. Later, she posted, “No government on earth is as genocidal as this settler colonial state,” referring to Israel.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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