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Yale University professor Nihcolas Christakis tweeted, “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?’”
By Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner
A Yale University campus newspaper has come under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas raping and beheading Israelis during its Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state.
“Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 25: This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men,” the Yale Daily News wrote in a statement at the bottom of a column by sophomore Sahar Tartak.
The article in question lambasted Yalies4Palestine (Y4P), a campus pro-Palestinian group, for defending and seemingly applauding Hamas’ terror onslaught, which resulted in the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Tartak specifically implored the campus community to imagine themselves in the shoes of the young people who were killed while attending the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” rave, into which Hamas terrorists air-glided and murdered over 260 civilians. She also discussed why civilians should not be targets in war.
“Violent resistance against the state is different from murdering babies with their families, which was Hamas’ only accomplishment this week — not liberation,” Tartak wrote. “And why is Y4P not rejecting but celebrating [sic] the horrors in and of themselves?”
Published on Oct. 12, the column was at some point afterward censored to no longer include a portion describing reports and eyewitness accounts of Hamas raping and beheading Israeli civilians.
Hamas murdered over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, injured thousands more, and kidnapped over 200 people as hostages during its terrorist onslaught. The brutality of Hamas’ attacks — which has been documented to include rape, torture, and the beheading of babies — has shocked the world.
Members of the Yale community have criticized the student paper’s censorship as hypocritical, noting that throughout the #MeToo movement and before, the Daily News reported on numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment, many of which were never challenged in a court of law.
“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 news outlets,” Yale alumni Chris Michel and Elyssa Friedland wrote in a letter to the paper. “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.”
Michel and Friedland added, “The hypocrisy is breathtaking. We hope the editorial board will take swift action to rectify this mistake.”
Yale University professor Nihcolas Christakis — who a mob of Yale students surrounded and heckled in 2015 after he questioned the wisdom of advising students to be overly cautious in choosing their Halloween costumes — also issued a statement on social media, writing on X/Twitter, “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 Algemeiner has reached out to the Yale Daily News for comment for this story.
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