Yale Paper Backtracks Editing Out Line Saying Hamas Raped Women, Beheaded Men

Last week, The Yale Daily News campus newspaper edited a student's column post-publication and provided an editor's note calling the article's claims of Hamas raping women and beheading men "unsubstantiated."

Tuesday, the paper returned the article to its original form.

The editor-in-chief, Anika Arora Seth, who identifies as one of the paper's "inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion co-chairs," uploaded an article explaining the edit:

The Yale Daily News published an opinion column on Oct. 12 titled “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?” On Oct. 13, the News published a separate opinion piece titled “Stop justifying terrorism.” In the former, the author wrote, in reference to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel, “yes, they raped women … yes, they beheaded men.” In the latter, the author wrote that Hamas “committed … rape.” The source that the columnists cited suspected cases of sexual assault. 
During our opinion editing process — which is separate from reported coverage — the News failed to ensure that the columnists’ statements were properly cited and attributed. At the time of the columns’ initial publication, those specific forms of violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack were not independently confirmed by the cited source.
On Oct. 25 and Oct. 26, the News published corrections to both pieces, modeled on reporting and corrections from other outlets — such as The Forward and The Los Angeles Times — from 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. 
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. 

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the paper made the change back after two Yale alumni and former editors at the paper responded to the change with a letter to the current staff, calling the hypocrisy "breathtaking.”

Reporter Zach Kessel provided a screenshot of the letter:

https://twitter.com/zach_kessel/status/1719132990364643646?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1719132990364643646%7Ctwgr%5E61f3ab8eab96a4bcc56bc2324bb6c0ef930009cf%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fpolicy%2Feducation%2Falumni-denounce-yale-student-newspaper-hamas-atrocities-unsubstantiated

"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 major news outlets," the authors wrote.

"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? The hypocrisy is breathtaking. We hope the editorial board will take swift action to rectify this mistake."

Moreover, the author of the piece in question, sophomore Sahar Tartak, followed up with a response in a guest op-ed for the Washington Free Beacon in which she calls the Yale Daily News the "home for modern-day Holocaust denial."

We would argue that the legacy media, not campus media, is that home. But we digress.

Ultimately, the paper faced immense backlash for seemingly providing Hamas an unreasonable benefit of the doubt several days after Joe Biden, the Israel Defense Forces, and a separate morgue worker for the military declared the terrorist group responsible for the murders and beheading of civilians.

Still, if there's a silver lining in the Yale paper editing out the truth it's that it reminded us that not all Ivy League students are coded. They do not all view civilians as either “colonized" or "colonizers."

Which, as we discussed, is the catalyst behind the pro-Hamas demonstrations at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and beyond.

There are some outliers with enough self-will to fend off the indoctrination and righteous indignation of Ivy professors, student groups, and editors.

Sahar Tarta is one of them.