Turkey has had the decency to admit that an Israeli bird that flew over its sovereign territory is not an Israeli Mossad spy, as first suspected last year.
The country’s Hurriyet newspaper reported that the dead bird, commonly known as a bee-eater, has been cleared one year later from any charges of spying. A Turkish farmer had found the bird, a dead Merops Apiaster bird, or European Bee-Eater, in his field. Considering Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s paranoia of Israel, it was not surprising that Ankara intelligence started working overtime to expose a Mossad spy.
The bird wore a metallic ring, stamped as “24311 Tel Avivunia Israel.” You would think that if the Mossad were going to spy with a bird, it would not advertise the fact, but Turkish officials obviously figured that the Mossad was using reverse psychology to trick them into thinking that the bird was not a spy.
It took a year for medical personnel ay Elazığ’s Fırat University to admit that the bird was not carrying a microchip.
The innocent bird now shares the same history as the squirrels, sharks and other Zionist animals that Arab countries suspect as being Mossad spies.
In 2007, Iran’s goon squads arrested 14 squirrels that “were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services.”
Three years later, Egypt blamed Israel for a breakout of shark attacks in the Red Sea, charging that the Mossad placed them there to damage tourism.
And there is the famous case of the Mossad vulture, the bird that Saudi Arabia detained on suspicion of spying.
In all cases, Paranoid Arab officials have made monkeys out of themselves.
