SHARKS, VULTURES AND BUBBEMEISERS

REPORT FROM GILO - Norman and Lola Cohen

In the constant battle against attempts to defame and delegitimise Israel we seldom find much to laugh at but recently two accusations have been so utterly absurd that we had to see the funny side of them.

MOSSAD “JAWS.”

In December there were reports of a shark attacking tourists enjoying water sports around Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt and subsequently, 30 miles of coastline were closed to swimmers by the authorities but not before five tourists had been very seriously injured and another one killed, by the creature. It was identified as an oceanic white tip shark, a species which does not normally come so near to the shore and is not known for attacking humans.

To begin with, the possible explanations seemed reasonable. Firstly, the Egyptians authorities blamed over-fishing which they claimed had caused the sharks to be hungry and so come near to he coastline in search of food, then the owners of tourist boats who drop meat into the waters to attract the sharks to the boat and so giving their passengers a close-up view of them were named as the culprits and next, a boat carrying livestock whose crew had thrown some dead animals overboard was accused. These all seemed to be rational theories but the Egyptians did not stop there. The Governor of South Sinai announced that he could not rule out the Mossad being behind the attacks, he suspected that Israeli intelligence agents may have caused them in order to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry.

An interesting theory but we have been trying to work out if Mossad agents themselves are suspected of disguising themselves as sharks and biting chunks out of swimmers or if the damage was caused by a specially indoctrinated Zionist shark trained by the Mossad. Another thought is that perhaps it was a remote controlled cyber-shark, after all Israel is renowned for its innovative high tech.

A SPYING VULTURE

On the heels of this tribute to Israeli ingenuity came another, this time involving a vulture which was caught in Saudi Arabia and promptly accused of spying for the Mossad. Suspicions were obviously aroused because the bird had been tagged with a GPS tracker by Tel Aviv University. Having seen, during our years of volunteering in the Clinic of the Jerusalem Zoo, the horrible things that have been done to birds of prey unfortunate enough to be caught and kept in Arab villages, we feared for the safety of this beautiful creature which is one of an endangered species. Happily, Saudi Prince, Bandar bin Saud Al Saud, understood about tracking devices and decried reports of the bird being part of a Zionist plot. As a result and to the joy of all conservationists, it has been set free.

FALSE ACCUSATIONS

These accusations are ludicrous but many others, which are spouted daily by the world’s media, often have a grain of truth in them and are almost impossible to check out accurately. Even if one can obtain the true facts from the Government Press, Prime Minister’s or Army Spokesman’s Offices, by the time they are published, if they ever are, it is too late, the mud has already stuck.

The saying, “A lie can be half way round the world before truth has got its boots on,” variously attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and even Julius Caesar, is, sadly, all too true.