Spy cows are the latest animals to join the lineup of Zoological conspiracy theories disseminated by Palestinians, with the Palestinian Authority’s official daily publishing an article about a man who encountered bovine “recruited and trained” by Israel and outfitted with surveillance equipment.
Israel has in the past been charged with deploying genetically engineered sharks into Egyptian waters, sending a species of poison-immune super rats to infest the Old City of Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter, and killer dolphins off Gaza’s shores to attack Hamas frogmen.
As recently as this week, Britain’s National Education Union (NEU) revived a boar-related conspiracy theory first popularized by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in 2014 when he insisted that “every night, [Israelis] release wild pigs against us.”
In fact, the phenomenon is so common there’s even an entire Wikipedia entry titled, “Israel-related animal conspiracy theories.”
In the article, published last Tuesday in the PA’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper, Rushd Morrar, a village elder from Khirbet Yanun in Judea and Samaria, is quoted as saying that he had encountered the spy cows near his village.
“These are recruited and trained cattle, as on the neck of each cow they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small,” the newspaper cited Morrar as saying, according to a translation by monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch.
Morrar also claimed that “settlers release herds of wild boars” to destroy Palestinian crops, the newspaper said, as well as alleging that “the settlers’ crimes are diversifying and becoming sophisticated, and the means they employ in their war are unlimited.”