(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Harvard Law conspiracy theorist Laurence Tribe appeared to brush off the brutal rape and torture of women, kidnapping of children for hostages, and murder of entire families by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas over the weekend—in a barbaric spree that left at least 700 Israelis and nine Americans dead—by implying that it may have been crisis actors.
Tribe—the mentor of leftist radicals including former President Barack Obama—was forced to delete a tweet thread suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was using the Hamas attacks to hide the corruption within his own regime, Fox News reported.
“Is Netanyahu wagging the dog of war to take attention away from his own war on the independent judiciary?” Tribe asked. “Can anyone put that past him?”
The term “wagging the dog” can be used to refer to a “superfluous (military) action in order to distract from domestic scandal,” a reference to a 1997 political comedy, which borrowed the phrase from an earlier idiom, according to Merriam–Webster.
Tribe was slammed by critics, including investigative reporter Julie Kelly, who suggested he might be in need of some deprogramming to assist with his self-loathing anti-Semitism.
You need to go commit yourself somewhere
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) October 7, 2023
Conservative pundit Dave Rubin, however, refused to allow the 81-year-old academic to use his declining mental faculties as an excuse.
You are a fucking idiot.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) October 7, 2023
Actor Matthew Marsden was equally blunt in his assessment, suggesting the issue was not with Tribe’s intelligence but his moral compass.
What an evil person you are.
— Matthew Marsden (@matthewdmarsden) October 7, 2023
Even well known left-wingers weighed in, such as former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who criticized the posts as “moronic and indefensible.”
Well this is a moronic and indefensible POV https://t.co/9eXIaSEMk1
— Keith Olbermann⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) October 7, 2023
He claimed that he had posted his comment before seeing the full scope of what was going on in Israel.
“I sent the tweet in response to Netanyahu’s reported comments [declaring war] before I saw the news of what Hamas had actually done, at which point I immediately deleted the tweet as a clearly premature, ill-informed and inappropriate response to incomplete information.”
He also said that he condemned “Hamas’s terrorist attacks and unthinkable atrocities against the Israeli people, including the murder and abduction of civilians, in the strongest possible terms” and pledged to “support Israel’s right of self-defense.”
While many would assume that a renowned professor at one of the world’s pre-eminent law schools and a top legal scholar with considerable influence over the policy positions a major American political party might be more measured in his public statements, this is not the first time Tribe has had to delete potentially problematic tweets.
In February 2022, he libelously accused then Fox News host Tucker Carlson of committing treason for questioning U.S. support for the war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of the country.
“Led by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the GOP’s Trump wing appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin,” Tribe wrote. “If Putin opts to wage war on our ally, Ukraine, such ‘aid and comfort’ to an ‘enemy’ would appear to become ‘treason’ as defined by Article III of the U.S. Constitution.”
Laurence Tribe has now deleted his original tweet as well as his follow-up. pic.twitter.com/hPPZ5cJ49s
— Jerry Dunleavy 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) February 21, 2022
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
