If something bad happens, you know that people will blame the Jews.
Jordan's Assawsana reports that the myna bird has been an highly invasive species in the Middle East that has threatened other native birds and are responsible for a steep decline of the population of native birds.
But how did the myna birds get to Israel to begin with?
The Jordanian paper claims that Jews brought the birds with them from Europe as pretty songbird pets in the 1930s. The message is clear: the myna is a foreign, external pest that arrived along with other foreign, external pests, the Jews.
I cannot find anywhere else that this is what happened. The most common explanation of the explosion of mynas in Israel is that they escaped from a bird sanctuary in the late 1990s and then established themselves in urban parks, especially around Tel Aviv, and spread from there.
However, the bird was also documented to have been deliberately introduced into Lebanon, Italy, Turkey and Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia, possibly to get rid of other pests.
The spread of the bird into Jordan indeed came from Israel, but at least one academic paper about that just can't bring itself to say the dreaded word Israel: " The common myna was first recorded in Jordan in 2010, in the Jordan Valley just north of the Dead Sea, as a result of secondary expansion of an invasive population from a neighboring country."
One other antisemitic reference to the myna comes from none other than a 2017 article in the Jerusalem Post by an Israeli, Jan Van Mil, who - like the Jordanian paper - likens the myna to Israeli Jews:
It is a new immigrant that thrives extremely well in almost all areas of Israel. It is very noisy, very rude, and very aggressive, it is intensely busy with harassing the original inhabitants, killing their offspring, destroying their nests or occupying them by themselves and it will not allow anyone but their own to settle the land.I vote for the Myna as the New National Bird of Israel.
There is literally nothing that people hate that cannot be twisted to be blamed on the Jews.
