Yale made an uncalculated liberal mistake. The student newspaper at Yale University retracted corrections it made to an op-ed written by a student that referenced Hamas terrorists raping women and beheading men during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The Yale Daily News had come under fire because its editors inserted an editor's note into the op-ed published last Oct. 13 questioning if the pro-Palestinian student organization was a hate group, and writing that the rapes and beheadings were "unsubstantiated," the Washington Examiner reported.
The columnist, sophomore Sarah Tartak, used a story from The Atlantic, which cited The Times of Israel for its reports of rapes and sexual assaults. The student newspaper then issued a series of corrections using examples from The Forward and The Los Angeles Times as models. The News was wrong to publish the corrections," editor-in-chief Anika Seth wrote in a statement published on the newspaper's website. "By the time of the first correction last 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." Seth wrote the newspaper wasn't trying 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," Seth wrote. "Threats of violence leveled against the News, its editors and their families have intensified this week. Threats of this severity are unacceptable in any circumstance. The News remains committed to reporting the facts and to creating a forum for free, fair, and honest campus and community dialogue."