The Yale student whose pro-Israel column was censored by editors without her knowledge slammed them for ‘horrifying antisemitism,’ and said the paper is ‘now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial.’
Sahar Tartak’s October 12 article titled, ‘Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?’ was hit with an editor’s note nearly two weeks later that read: ‘This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.’
The note was referring to the sentences ‘Yes, they raped women’ and ‘Yes, they beheaded men.’ The editors removed those sentences and added an editor’s correction to the bottom of Tartak’s article, without telling her.
Following the incident, Tartak said she received a ‘non-answer’ from Yale Daily News editors, including editor-in-chief Anika Seth, who released a statement only after Tartak’s story went viral. ‘It was horrifying,’ she recalled.
‘To see them do something like this … for me to contact the editor and give them a chance to correct it and nonetheless receive a non-answer is pretty horrifying,’ Tartak said in an exclusive interview with Senator Marsha Blackburn on ‘Unmuted.’
Yale’s campus newspaper is facing backlash for censoring pro-Israel columnist Sahar Tartak by removing references to Hamas terrorists beheading men and raping women
Tartak’s column was published shortly after a Hamas attack on October 7, which resulted in the slaughtering of over 1,400 Israelis, some of whom were found beheaded-including German-Israel Shani Louk-whose skull was found this weekend
Tartak called the denial of Hamas’ atrocities on campus, a ‘second wave’ of anti-Semitism in an exclusive article with Sen. Marsha Blackburn on ‘Unmuted’
Tartak told .com on Wednesday that she has been receiving threatening messages and have had her peers insult her on anonymous forums since her column was controversy edited.
‘I’ve received messages asking me where I live, saying ‘we’re coming for you,’ she said.
Tartak said Yale Daily News is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial in a powerful op-ed for The Washington Free Beacon.
‘This pipeline is full of sewage, and it shows. The Yale Daily News is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial, where brutalizing Jews does not need to be justified. It’s just denied outright,’ Tartak wrote.
But Tartak said she is not afraid – and ‘refuses to hide her Judaism.’ ‘The Jewish community at Yale has been really supportive and horrified by the whole event,’ she told .com.
‘What happened in the paper was a reflection of a trend to justify and then deny Hamas’ brutality,’ she said.
‘My plan is to continue fundraising for Israel and inviting my classmates to Shabbat dinners.’
Since her story came out, Tartak told .com, that she has been receiving threatening messages and have had her peers insult her on anonymous forums
Following the incident, Tartak, a sophomore at Yale, said she received a ‘non-answer’ from Yale Daily News editors, including editor-in-chief Anika Seth, who released a statement only after Tartak’s story went viral
Tartak called the denial of Hamas’ atrocities on campus, a ‘second wave’ of anti-Semitism.
‘The answer is that this is anti-Semitism, pure and simple, right?’ she said to Blackburn.
‘So, so the first wave of anti-Semitism that we experienced following the October 7th massacres was groups like Gales for Palestine justifying Hamas’ brutalization, torture, murder, and rape of Jews and non-Jews in Israel.’
‘I guess we could call this a second wave, is denying that those brutalities happened in the first place saying, no, the Jews are exaggerating. By no means are they victims of persecution.’
‘Again, we know that this is not true, but students at my university and people across the world basically cannot accept that Hamas is far from resistance and is rather a terrorist organization.’
What’s most concerning, Tartak emphasized, is that editors at Yale could go on to work at the top mainstream media companies in the country.
‘I think that students at Yale are in a pipeline to elite newspapers, right? she said. ‘The New York Times, the Washington Post. I think nobody wants to see the people who are now denying this massacre be the same people who are reporting our news in a couple of years.’
‘I wish I could write off my classmates’ foibles as youthful stupidity,’ she wrote in the Beacon. ‘But I see professional journalists making the same mistakes. It’s not an accident.’
‘The Yale Daily News is their breeding ground, and in a few years, the editors who wrote and approved that correction will go on to careers in the mainstream press, which is chock-full of Yale Daily News editors and reporters.’
‘Take the New York Times, where the author of the flagship daily newsletter, the paper’s diplomatic and Supreme Court correspondents, and the host of the paper’s hit podcast The Daily are all Yale Daily News alumni.’
An Instagram post by Yalies4Palestine following the October 7 terrorist attack – justifying the rape, torture and slaughtering that occurred – claiming it was an ‘inevitable outcome’
Tartak wrote that the Yale paper is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial, where brutalizing Jews does not need to be justified
Yalies4Palestine protesting against Israel after the country suffered an unprovoked surprise terrorist attack – where 1,400 innocent civilians were brutally murdered in one day
Speaking to Senator Blackburn, Tartak said: ‘I’m not saying that these students don’t have free speech rights and need to be suppressed.’
‘I’m saying that they need to be condemned and that the university has a responsibility to take a moral stance on something so basic as denying or justifying or somehow doing both the events that happened on October 7th, the murder, the brutality, the rape, the burning, the torture, the kidnapping it.’
‘They’re, they’re steeped in an ideology, and that ideology is denial,’ she added.
‘It is evasion. You say, look at this picture of a burnt baby’s body, and I’m sorry to be crass, but that’s what happened. And they just look away and say that it’s not real, because I guess that’s the easiest thing to do when you feel the need to side with the perpetrators. ‘
Since her story circulated, Anika Seth, Editor in Chief at the Yale Daily News, released a ‘clarification,’ titled ‘On recent editor’s notes.’
Seth admitted it was ‘wrong’ to publish the correction, claiming the decision was due to a lack of ‘publicly available evidence for those horrific acts,’ at the time of Tartak’s article – despite Hamas releasing GoPro footage of the brutal acts.
‘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.’
Two former Yale newspaper editors wrote a letter to current staff, claiming ‘The hypocrisy is breathtaking’
The correction has caused substantial backlash online from alumni who previously worked at the paper, journalists and professors at Yale
‘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.’
She concluded by turning the conversation toward herself and her fellow Yale News editors – making them out to be the victims over threats they have supposedly been receiving.
‘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,’ she concluded.
Tartak pointed out the absurdity of this statement – writing ‘unlike the Nazis, who took pains to hide their actions, Hamas broadcast them to the world.’
‘Live videos of the horrors were circulating on the internet—and on broadcast television—on the day of the attack,’ she wrote in the Free Beacon.
‘For those with lingering doubts, or inclined to split hairs about whether victims were beheaded or simply found with severed heads, international reporters were on the ground in Israel within 48 hours to chronicle the atrocities.’
Tartak’s column was published shortly after a Hamas attack on October 7, which resulted in the slaughtering of over 1,400 Israelis, some of whom were found beheaded-including German-Israel Shani Louk-whose skull was found this weekend.
Yalies4Palestine is a student group that describes itself as a ‘student group organizing Yale’s community to support the freedom of the Palestinian people,’ on its Twitter page.
After the October 7 terrorist attack, the group excused the slaughtering of families, babies and the elderly, insisting that ‘Breaking out of a prison requires force, not desperate appeals to the colonizer.’
Tartak, a 19-year-old student from Long Island, reposted a tweet by Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, who asked: ‘Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?’
The ‘organization’ has been called out previously for their hateful and anti-Semitic rhetoric, including in an New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens just last week, titled ‘The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself.’
The correction has caused substantial backlash online from alumni who previously worked at the paper, journalists and professors at Yale.
Tartak, a 19-year-old student from Long Island, reposted a tweet by Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, who asked: ‘Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?’
‘I’m still collecting my thoughts on the YDN’s egregious correction. But until then, what Prof. Christakis and others have said does the job,’ Tartak commented on X.
Two former Yale newspaper editors wrote a letter to current staff, claiming ‘The hypocrisy is breathtaking.’
‘From 2001-2002, we served as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the Yale Daily News respectively. We write this open letter to express our profound disappointment over an editor’s note appended to a recent opinion column published in the News.’
‘We were committed to printing a diversity of voices on our opinion pages, and we thought long and hard- and often vigorously debated before we published anything on behalf of the editorial board.
‘How far this paper has fallen in twenty years. On October 13, YD published a thoughtful, well-written, and, most importantly, factually accurate opinion piece by Ariane de Gennaro entitled ‘Stop Justifying Terrorism.’ In it, the writer described the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, attacks that included murder, kidnapping, and rape.’
‘We were shocked and dismayed to see an editor’s note printed on October 26 that said: ‘This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims of rape.’ Make no mistake: these claims of rape are substantiated and had been long before the editor’s note was published.’
Chris Michel, Editor-in-Chief from 2001 to 2002 and Elyssa Friedland, Managing Editor wrote the letter condemning the editorial board.
‘The Israeli government, recognizing the temptation to downplay or deny evidence of brutality by Hamas, made the extraordinary decision to screen 43 minutes of video content for journalists that importantly was extracted from the body cameras these men wore and the cellphones they used to record their atrocities.’
‘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.’
Ms Louk’s motionless body was paraded by Hamas gunmen after the festival attack in Israel. It was unclear if she was alive in the video, although her mother later stated that she was alive and being held in a Gaza hospital
Palestinian fighters can be seen cheering and driving away as Shani’s body lies motionless in the back of the truck
Israeli civilians and soldiers were taken off the street and driven back into Gaza on October 7, 2023
A baby’s seat and a child’s dress are seen spattered in blood in the aftermath of the attack
One appalling photograph released by Israel shows the blackened and charred bodies of a baby killed by Hamas terrorists
‘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.’
Former New York Times editor and founder of The Free Press, Bari Weiss, added: ‘This is Holocaust denial in real time at @yaledailynews.’
There have been various reports that Hamas terrorists both committed rape and beheaded people during their murder rampage.
Israel released footage of a terrorist who explained that they were given the go-ahead to rape the corpse of young girls, according to The Times of Israel.
‘Make no mistake: these claims of rape are substantiated and had been long before the editor’s note was published. Consider the lede of an October 14 Reuters story: ‘Military forensic teams in Israel have examined bodies of victims of last week’s Hamas attack on communities around the Gaza Strip and found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities, officers said on Saturday,’ the letter continued.
Israeli forensic teams describe signs of torture and abuse in victims, according to a Reuters article. NBC News also reported ‘signs of rape’ in videos of the attack.
Just this weekend, the family of Shani Louk announced that she is dead after a bone from the base of her skull was found three weeks after she was abducted by Hamas terrorists at the Nova electronic festival and paraded on the back of a truck.