On Tuesday, Yale News admitted that it had wrongly censored and dismissed a Jewish college student’s description of the horrors committed against Israelis by Hamas terrorists.
On October 12, five days after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on a music festival in Israel, Yale News published an opinion column by Yale Sophomore Sahar Tartak, titled “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?”
In one paragraph, Tartak asserted that Hamas raped women and beheaded men (emphasis added):
“This sort of barbarism went on throughout Israel this weekend, committed by Hamas terrorists from Gaza intent on killing as many Jews as possible. Yes, they raped women. Yes, they kidnapped children. Yes, they beheaded men. Yes, they cheered the whole time. It’s all on video. Over 1,200 are dead, not to mention those kidnapped and maimed. This is terror, and Hamas is a designated terrorist group — as described by the United States, European Union and dozens of other countries.”
Two weeks after the column’s publication, however, Yale News removed Tartak’s claims and issued the following Editor’s note:
“Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 25: This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
The edited version of the paragraph appears below (emphasis added):
“This sort of barbarism went on throughout Israel this weekend, committed by Hamas terrorists from Gaza who seemed intent on killing as many Jews as possible. Yes, they kidnapped children. Yes, they cheered the whole time. It’s all on video. Over 1,200 are dead, not to mention those kidnapped and maimed. This is terror, and Hamas is a designated terrorist group — as described by the United States, European Union and dozens of other countries.”
In a Washington Free Beacon column, Tartak reports that she’s not the only victim of this type of censorship:
“The correction added to my piece wasn't a one-off, a fluke, a case of a rogue editor's bad judgment. My friend Ariane de Gennaro's Oct. 13 op-ed now includes the following correction: "This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims of rape." She told me that, like me, she was not consulted about the correction.”
On Tuesday, in a Yale News piece titled “On recent editor’s notes,” the publication’s Editor in Chief and President, Anika Seth, admits the two mistakes and apologizes:
“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.
“It was never the News’ intention to minimize the brutality of Hamas’ attack against Israel. 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.”