ANALYSIS: Yale student newspaper retracts anti-Semitic edits, but clarification confirms bias
A quick Google search of confirmed Hamas atrocities confirms that Yale Daily News got it wrong.
Yale Daily News’ editor-in-chief, Anika Arora Seth, has now retracted a “correction” it made to an Oct. 12 article that called Hamas’ rape of women and beheading of men “unsubstantiated claims.”
Seth tries to explain her actions in an Oct. 31 statement, but the timeline she presents betrays her performative faux commitment to journalism ethics. Unpacking the sequence of events that happened reveals that Seth and Yale Daily News have no interest in pursuing the truth about Hamas terrorism against Jews.
The @yaledailynews has issued a statement regarding its editor’s notes: “The News was wrong to publish the corrections.”https://t.co/dMRIKOuH6B https://t.co/8QfYWmSpZd pic.twitter.com/stOFktWEar
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) October 31, 2023
The problem rests in these two paragraphs from Seth’s statement. They read:
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.
Campus Reform mentioned the same Oct. 15 Reuters article in its report on the correction, but that wasn’t the first confirmed report of women being raped. As the Campus Reform article notes, MSNBC ran confirmation of Hamas raping women on Oct. 10, a whole two days prior to the initial publication of the Yale Daily News article.
In the age of fast-paced digital journalism, Yale Daily News’ error reveals that its staff had no interest in Googling the most current information on the Hamas terror attacks and the now-unfolding war.
A quick Google search of confirmed Hamas atrocities, which produces the MSNBC and Reuters reports among others, confirms that Yale Daily News got it wrong.
”It was never the News’ intention to minimize the brutality of Hamas’ attack against Israel,” Seth states.
Opposition to terrorism is an entry-level requirement for being human, so the publication should expect no sympathy on that count. It is apparent, however, that the News did intend to not look for information that confirms the extent of Hamas extremism, whether in the form of physical torture or in its propaganda that brainwashed college students into thinking there are two equivocal sides to Oct. 7.
The Los Angeles Times correction that Seth mentions is a reference to an Oct. 9 piece, published 48 hours after the initial attacks. On that day, the number of casualties, range of atrocities, and lingering presence of Hamas in southern Israel were all unclear. The uncertainty benefited those who sympathized with the terrorist organization because unconfirmed reports gave anti-Semites plausible deniability.
It’s not hard to Google. Toddlers do it on their parents’ phones all the time. It’s easier than giving a monkey a typewriter and waiting for it to produce the words of Shakespeare.
It is easy to see, however, that Yale Daily News wanted to exist in a perpetuated state of plausible deniability. The success of anti-Semitism depends on a critical mass of people indifferent to or comfortable with Jewish suffering choosing to not pursue truth.
There is a moral obligation not to look away from the documented and confirmed videos and photos of what Hamas did to Jewish women, children, and men. Yale Daily News failed that obligation because it was not looking.
Anti-Semitism does not always manifest as outward physical hatred, which the left cannot understand. Anti-Semitism is not always going to be as tidy for progressives as the white nationalist who shot up people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The decision to maintain ignorance for the sake of a political narrative that benefits those who massacre Jews is anti-Semitism, and it is a choice.
Refuting the truth about Hamas and about innocent civilians is what Refaat Alareer does on his X account. He has a history of twisting facts about Hamas to erase their role in Palestinian suffering and terrorism against Israelis. “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are,” he said in 2018.
The University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy League school, maintained indifference and averted its gaze away when hosted him at its Palestine Writes Literature Festival in September.
On Oct. 29, credible reports emerged that during the Oct. 7 attack, a group of Hamas terrorists killed a Jewish baby by baking it in the oven.
”With or without baking powder?” Alareer asked on X.
The Christian Post reported on the act using testimony from an Israeli paramedic at the scene:
The paramedic said he saw a dead baby that had been burned inside an oven by Hamas. He also described seeing a woman who was four months pregnant when Hamas severed her stomach to rip her baby out of her womb and then stabbed the child before killing the woman in front of her family.
The distance between Yale Daily News’ conscious omissions, Alareer’s vitriol, and the actions of Hamas are separated only by a matter of degrees - and much smaller ones than any self-impressed northeast cosmopolitan liberal will ever admit to themselves or anyone else.
Hamas relies on its supply chain of digital misinformation and the susceptibility of masses contented with anti-Israel narratives to bolster its morale and resolve. Complicity with the regime of indifference to Jewish persecution - whether physical or social - is anti-Semitism.
”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 writes.
Videos emerged this morning of a group of pro-Hamas students at Harvard University physically entrapping a Jewish classmate and yelling “Shame!” - because he was Jewish.
Harvard students protesting against Israel surround a Jewish student and stop him from being able to leave.
🇺🇸🇮🇱
pic.twitter.com/oOpGpUWQat— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 1, 2023
On college campuses - in the Ivy League - this is what the “unintended consequences” can look like.
Far away from terrorist cells, the anti-Semitic regime feeds off the legitimacy its clusters of hateful students give one another. Intellectual malpractice - the distortion or covering up of truth - emboldens others to take action against innocent people.
Students across the country are yelling ”Intifada!” on their campus quads. Intifada is the call for the Palestinian purification of Israel - the genocide of Jews in their ancestral homeland. They learned it from their professors who assert Hamas’ ”right to resist” and refuse to label the group as a terrorist organization.
The academic justifications for Hamas extremism - and their slippage from the classroom to online - make the distance between the student intimidation against Jews and Oct. 7 much closer than most people realize. The ease to go from radical activism to outright violence should frighten everyone.
If history and recent events are any indicator, the Yale Daily News retraction is too late to prevent some detrimental impact against Jews.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
