Will The LA Times Walk Back Its Correction Casting Doubt on Hamas’ Sexual Crimes in Israel?

On October 9, the Los Angeles Times affixed an editor’s note to Jonah Goldberg’s column about Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israeli civilians two days earlier.

In his original column, Goldberg implied that the Islamic fundamentalists who murdered 1,400 Israelis had also committed sexual atrocities.

“However brutal you might think Israel’s Gaza policy might be, the murderers still chose to murder, the rapists chose to rape,” wrote Goldberg in one instance that was struck in the amended version.

In another, Goldberg called critiques of Israel’s security apparatus “the geopolitical equivalent of figuratively (and one might say literally) blaming rape victims for not being careful enough.” The parenthetical was later changed to “(and possibly literally).”

“An earlier version of this column mentioned rape in the attacks, but such reports have not been substantiated,” reads the editor’s note itself.

The assertion of the editor’s note was lacking in context when it was made, and it has since been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Hamas did exactly what Goldberg said it had.

By the time that the changes were made last Monday night, Tablet Magazine had published an eyewitness report about the carnage at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel:

Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”

Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.

The sourcing there is admittedly unclear. Did the survivor watch sexual crimes occur with his own two eyes or did one of his fellow survivors relay the story to him?

In any case, the account was accompanied by other circumstantial evidence. As Tablet noted, one woman filmed in Hamas’ custody is shown being shepherded out of a vehicle in Gaza with blood on the seat of her pants.

Another now infamous video shows an apparently unconscious woman being driven through Gaza wearing nothing but her underwear.

Moreover, radical Islamic terrorists are known to use rape and sexual coercion as weapons of war. One need not — and should not — enforce the same evidentiary standards for allegations against a terrorist organization during a documented attack on civilians than would be enforced for allegations made against an individual in an American courtroom.

Reasonable minds could disagree about whether it was safe to deduce from this evidence that sexual crimes had, with 100% certainty, occurred over the course of Hamas’ attack. Indeed, it would have been wholly unobjectionable for the Times to modify Goldberg’s language to attribute the allegations to an eyewitness, or to acknowledge the circumstantial evidence while hedging on any statement of fact.

But it’s hard to see how the less-than-ambiguous denial of substantiation issued by the Times was accurate when it was first issued.

And since then, it’s become clear that the attack included the very crimes referenced by Goldberg did occur.

Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden confirmed the accounts of rape in televised addresses last week. Israeli forensic teams, meanwhile, have “found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities” on the trail of corpses left by Hamas.

“We’ve seen dismembered bodies with their arms and feet chopped off, people that were beheaded, a child that was beheaded,” one official told Reuters before confirming that she was aware of multiple cases of rape.

Still, the Times‘s editor’s note remains, and a spokeswoman for the paper insisted that the updates made on October 9 reflected “what had been substantiated at that point in time.”

“We do not have any additional comment beyond what’s included in the correction note,” she added.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.