You don’t have to be paranoid to lead a Moslem country. But if you are, it clearly helps. Saudi Arabian officials have “arrested” a wounded vulture that landed in a rural area of the country wearing a transmitter and  leg bracelet etched with the words “Tel Aviv University.” Therefore, it was clearly a spy working for Mossad.

The smart Islamics who found it immediately saw through the Israeli cover story. The Jews say the bird is part of research into bird migration patterns. This obviously ridiculous notion cut no ice with residents of Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. For them, this bird is  obviously a winged Zionist spy, and the transmitter he was wearing was sending vital classified information back to the “Zionist regime.” You can see why Saudi Arabia was such a success story even before the British and Americans found their oilfields….

Saudi Arabia’s Al Weeam newspaper was the first to report the spy’s intrusion into Islamic airspace. It noted that the vulture had landed near the house of a local sheikh, and was not afraid of people. Aha! The reporter and the people he interviewed asserted that the aggressive nature of the bird - so unlike vultures(!) - and the foul odor that came out of its mouth - were evidence of a Zionist plot, rather than tell-tale signs that this was in fact a vulture.  I mean, the Saudis would not be so stupid as to mistake a spy for a vulture, would they?

Once the vulture’s cover was blown there was an explosion of comments on Islamic news websites and online forums, always the home of rational and learned debate,  with people across the region convinced  “the Zionists” had  trained the beasts of the wild to do their bidding. After all, wasn’t the prophet Elijah fed by a raven? Pretty conclusive, I’d say. Iran’s Tabnak news agency said as much when it reported that “spy personnel number of X63 [the identification number on the bird’s leg bracelet] leaves no doubt that other birds are going to be sent by the Zionist regime for espionage against Saudi Arabia and other countries.” Better get those anti aircraft defences in order.

Furthermore, the Israelis have form when it comes to getting animals to do their dirty work. The revelations about the spy bird come just weeks after Egyptian officials claimed that a string of shark attacks at resorts in the Sinai Peninsula were the work of Israel’s Mossad spy agency. The sharks were trained by Mossad to eat tourists, with the obvious intention of destroying Arab tourist areas and sending all those wealthy Europeans in search of safer havens off Israel’s coast. The sharks there are made to behave. Obvious, isn’t it?  You can see these Islamics are no bird brains.....