The editors of Yale’s 145-year-old student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, have come under heavy fire for a series of printed “corrections” made to two pro-Israel student columns about the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. The corrections removed what the editors called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas atrocities such as beheadings and rape.

At the same time, the Daily News has, in the last three weeks, published numerous opinion columns accusing Israel of “genocide,” “apartheid,” “indiscriminate targeting of hospitals,” and various other atrocities, all without verification.

“Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 26,” reads one note appended by the Daily News’s editors to a piece by one of their columnists, Ariane De Gennaro, who denounced the group “Yalies4Palestine” for justifying terrorism. “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims of rape.” A similar editor’s note was attached to another column, by sophomore Sahar Tartak, who suggested that Yalies4Palestine was a hate group. “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men,” reads the correction. 

The “corrections” have subjected the storied  student organization to what is likely more unwelcome scrutiny.  Even before the October 7 attacks, the self-styled “Oldest College Daily” was in internal turmoil after the resignation of two senior-level editors who accused the institution of being a racist “training ground for jealousy, slander and apathy towards the suffering of others.”

The controversy has also cast a harsh spotlight on Yale as a whole, which, until now, has avoided the global opprobrium poured on sister Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania who are under siege from furious alumni and members of Congress for their students’ and faculties’ antisemitic statements and pro-Hamas rallies. While Yale’s outgoing president, Peter Salovey, has roundly condemned Hamas, an examination of the Daily News’s recently ublished opinion columns reveals deep seated antisemitism and hatred of Israel in the student body.

“Who is the Yale Daily News Editor?” Commentary Magazine’s editor, John Podhoretz, asked rhetorically on X. “Joseph Goebbels?” 

Former Daily News editors were dismayed by the downward drift of the institution. “How far the paper has fallen in twenty years,” wrote two Daily News alumni from 2001 and 2002, Chris Michel and Elyssa Friedland. “It defies belief that this editorial board would … characterize claims of rape during the Hamas attack as ‘unsubstantiated’ in the face of ample substantiation in major news outlets.” 

“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 former editors, now a corporate lawyer and novelist, respectively, added. 

Yale sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, who was famously screamed at in 2015 by enraged undergraduates after his wife defended the rights of children to dress in certain Halloween costumes, asked rhetorically on X, “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’?”

“This is Holocaust denial in real time,” wrote Bari Weiss of the Free Press. 

Despite its intrusive editing of pro-Israel pieces, the Daily News’s editors have, in the last three weeks, published a series of statements from student authors extolling the virtues of Hamas or excoriating Israel without scrutiny.

One October 13 article by a 2020 graduate and co-founder of Yale Jews for Palestine, who uses they/them pronouns, Ryan Gittler-Muniz, defended the Hamas attacks as being justified due to “a right to resist their own occupation by all available means, a stance endorsed by the United Nations.” The United Nations has given no such endorsement.

The article was, however, corrected after they falsely accused Israeli soldiers of disemboweling pregnant women in the notorious 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, during which Christian militia members slaughtered at least 460 civilians at Beirut and in an adjacent refugee camp.

An editor’s note was added but the claim was allowed to stay in the piece with blame shifted to “Israeli-backed Lebanese” militias. In 1983, an Israeli commission found that the Israeli Defense Forces had failed to take meaningful action to stop the killings and were indirectly responsible for the incident. Yet Israel has never been found to have ordered or even encouraged the slaughter. 

Another opinion column, written by Yousof Omeish and Daud Shad, 2022 and 2021 graduates, respectively, accused Israel of “genocide” and of “indiscriminate targeting of hospitals,” the latter claim having been repeatedly discredited by Western intelligence agencies and establishment press.  Mr. Omeish currently serves as a Special Assistant to Senator Bennet of Colorado, according to Legistorm. 

On October 16th, the Daily News also published a column by a sophomore who is a member of Socialist Revolution, a New Haven communist group, Elisa Miah. Ms. Mia justified the Hamas attacks by arguing that they were “directly responding to raids on Al-Aqsa mosque” this year. Senior Hamas officials have confirmed in news interviews that they planned the attacks for two years.

Furthermore, describing the recent clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians on the Temple Mount as “Israeli raids” is inaccurate, as the clashes occurred after Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the mosque due to false rumors that Jews planned to sacrifice a goat on the site, which is also sacred to Jews. 

In her column, Ms. Miah further justified the October 7 terror attack, arguing that “many have claimed that Hamas’s attack was motivated by rabid antisemitism, hatred of Jews and nothing else. This is false. Both the long term causes that led to this situation and the spark that lit the flame can be identified in the oppression of the Palestinian people.” 

Ms. Miah also claimed that “thousands of fleeing civilians are mercilessly [being] bombed by Israeli forces.” Though Israel launched a single tactical strike of what it says was a Hamas target near the Egyptian border, there have been no reports of “merciless bombing” of Palestinians evacuating to the South from Northern Gaza. One other explosion, on a main corridor for evacuees to the South of Gaza, is believed to have been a propane explosion. 

The long list of anti-Israel articles in the Daily News following October 7 that are loose with the facts or contain innuendo include a piece by a freshman, Bilal Kharrat, who claimed in an October 27 column that the attempt to evacuate Palestinians to the south in order to avoid further casualties is “the culmination of 75 years of oppression in one final attempt to eradicate and displace the Palestinian people.”  

And an October 17 Daily News column by a political science graduate student, Zainab Firdausi, accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”

As for the pro-Israel columns “corrected” by the Daily News, one such article was written by Yale sophomore Sahar Tartak, who is the editor-in-chief of a conservative campus paper, the Yale Free Press. In her Daily News column, Ms. Tartak called out Yalies4Palestine, who had released an inflammatory statement on October 8 which, referring to Israel as “the Zionist entity,” argued that “Palestinians made history” on October 7 and that “breaking out of a prison requires force.” 

Ms. Tartak’s column argued strongly against the Yalies4Palestine’s message. “There is no place for student organizations who publicly celebrate the murder and kidnapping of innocent civilians,” she wrote. “Y4P glorifies terrorism, cloaking it in the language of justice and human rights to feign innocence. For shame.”

After the Daily News’s editors “corrected” her column, Ms. Tartak posted on X that she is still collecting her thoughts on “the YDN’s egregious correction.” 

The Daily News has so far remained silent despite the firestorm over the corrections. Its newly-elected editor-in-chief, Anika Seth, has had a rocky start after the city editor, Megan Vaz, publicly resigned last month due to the organization’s famously brutal editor elections making her so upset she could “only stomach bananas.”  

Ms. Seth, whose tweets are private, says in her X profile that she is “studying gender, abortion and biomedical engineering.” Her Linkedin page, which says she’s also studying “women’s gender and sexuality studies,” shows a banner image of a masked protester holding a sign saying “Solidarity is Essential.” 

The institution over which Ms. Seth now presides has a long history of innovation in journalism. The timeworn newspaper term “bulldog edition” comes from the Yale Daily News, which was also the wellspring of Time magazine, whose founders, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, were Daily News alumni.

The father of the intellectual conservative movement, William Buckley Jr., also presided over the organization before going on to found National Review. In recent years, however, the Daily News has produced fewer journalists as the internet cast the news business into disarray and Ivy League graduates retreated to safer careers in law and finance.