Two Yale alumni and former leaders at the Yale Daily News denounced the school newspaper for an editor’s note that said reports of Hamas beheading and raping women were “unsubstantiated.”
The statement, which was in the form of a letter to the paper’s editors, was reported by National Review’s Zach Kessel, and came after the student newspaper drew criticism for removing references to the Hamas terrorist organization beheading people and raping women in an op-ed by a student that questioned whether a pro-Palestinian group on campus was a hate group.
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The op-ed, written by sophomore student Sahar Tartak, was published on Oct. 12, but 13 days later, on Oct. 25, the editors of the campus newspaper added a note that said: “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
NEW: Two former @yaledailynews editors write a letter to current staff. “The hypocrisy is breathtaking.” https://t.co/8QfYWmSpZd pic.twitter.com/BZliDlG9ed
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) October 30, 2023
Tartak, in an op-ed for the Washington Free Beacon, said that the editor-in-chief of the paper, Anika Arora Seth, did not inform her of the update prior to making it and that Seth said that at the time of the article’s publishing “there was swirling unsubstantiation [sic] of the rape and beheading claims.”
“The Yale Daily News is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial, where brutalizing Jews does not need to be justified,” Tartak wrote. “It’s just denied outright.”
Seth did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
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In their letter to the current editors, Chris Michel and Elyssa Friedland, who served as editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively, in the 2001-2002 school year, said they wanted to express “profound disappointment” with the decision to add the editor’s note, and noted that the Israeli government had screened 43 minutes of video taken from the sites of Hamas’s attack.
“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,” they 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.”
