Greetings, friends. As many of you know, we here at "I'm With Stupid" don't usually like to toot our own horns, despite the profound positive impact we make on the world each and every week, but this week we're going to engage in a little self-congratulations because, by golly, we think we've earned it.
Some of you may recall a column from November 2009 wherein we brought you the inspiring story of a bear in India's Kashmir region that single-handedly killed two heavily armed Muslim separatists and wounded two others. You remember that, don't you? No? None of you? Well, we wrote it, trust us.
Given the effectiveness of the bear as a killing machine, coupled with the fact that it clearly knew to target the bad guys, we recommended mating polar bears with grizzly bears to create a formidable, low-cost army of grizzlar bears (yes, there is such a thing) to do our fighting for us and keep our troops out of harm's way.
Anyway, we are happy to report that, just over a year later, someone has finally heeded our advice. And not just any someone, mind you, but no less than Israel's Mossad, one of the world's most renowned and feared foreign intelligence agencies.
Now, admittedly, Mossad agents didn't train bears to kill Islamic militants, as we suggested, but they did utilize the idea of putting deadly animals to work for them. At least, they did if you believe the governor of Egypt's South Sinai region.
The story goes something like this: Last week, as was widely reported, the Red Sea beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was terrorized by a series of "horrific" shark attacks (as opposed to the non-horrific kind) that killed one person and injured several others, leading local authorities to close the beaches to swimmers.
In response, rumors began to circulate that a deadly rogue shark had been released in the area by Mossad agents, despite the fact that Egypt is one of the few Middle Eastern nations that gets along with Israel.
Rather than quell such rumors, the South Sinai governor, Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha, responded on an official Egyptian news site by saying, "What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question."
As expected, Israeli officials immediately rejected Shousha's claims as "ludicrous," because, really, what else are they going to say? And on the surface, you'd have to agree they have a point. There are many reasons why such a hare-brained scheme wouldn't make any sense.
First of all, Israel has resorts on the Red Sea, too, meaning that Israeli citizens could just as easily be attacked. Secondly, it's very hard to train a shark to differentiate between a Muslim and a Jew taste-wise, since neither eat pork, and third, there's no guarantee that the shark wouldn't just swim away, meaning all the time and money spent training it would go to waste. Furthermore, a cargo ship apparently dumped a bunch of animal carcasses in the area last month, essentially filling the water with delicious chum.
So that's why it wasn't an Israeli-trained shark that did the attacks, or so they would have you believe. Here's why it was: After reviewing photographic evidence from the attacks, shark experts have determined that two separate species, the mako and the oceanic whitetip, did the attacking, ruling out the notion of a deranged rogue shark. This is important to note, because the Mossad would have obviously trained more than one shark at a time, and using those two species makes a lot of sense tactically.
The oceanic whitetip, while slow-moving, is very aggressive and "dominates feeding frenzies," according to Wikipedia. The mako, by contrast, is the fastest shark in the sea. So you have the mako to track people down and the whitetip to chew them up. Clever. Just the sort of scheme you'd expect a brilliant organization like the Mossad to dream up.
More importantly, the elderly woman killed in one of the recent shark attacks, while not Arabic, was German. I'm sure I don't have to remind you of the not-so-friendly history between Germans and Jews. The woman was probably not the Mossad's primary target, but the fact that she was attacked shows a latent anti-German bias on the part of the offending fish.
So don't believe Israel when it says it had nothing to do with this. It did. But don't forget who really deserves the credit: I'm With Stupid.
Todd Hartley was one of the world's fastest breaststrokers until he got married. To read more or leave a comment, please visit zerobudget.net