al Bassaleh

In addition to bombs and missiles that have killed an ever increasing number of Palestinian civilians, Israel has dropped millions of flyers on the occupied, besieged Gaza Strip. The Electronic Intifada decided to call the number provided on one such flyer. What follows is a translation of the Arabic conversation between an EI editor and an Israeli officer who identifed himself using the Arabic name “Abu Ibrahim.”

A team of scientists, working in the BBC’s Children’s Science Unit, who recently completed an exhaustive week-long undersea geological survey of the Mariana Trench of Irony, the deepest known submarine trench in the world, announced today that the water tested seemed to be primarily composed of salty, reptillian, American, clusterbomber tears. In related front page news…

The New York Times, considered America’s “newspaper of record” and one of the most highly-respected newspapers in the world, yesterday published a previously-unknown and startling revelation about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the longest-running dispute over land in the modern world. With no less force than as if a giant asteroid had struck the earth, the Times’ unparalleled editorial team, in both print and web editions, offered its readers around the globe a commendably timely gift of knowledge, with the front page headline….

BNN’s Your Thoughts is brought to you by the BNN Under Department of Tahta Maintenance, the department that exists to recycle graphics in a low maintenance kind of way, in order that we have to struggle less on our budget to come up with original content. Partially original content is what cable news is all about, so we’re definitely making big strides on the road to media professionalism here in our corner of the truth-telling universe, or as Stephen Colbert might have put it — if he’d thought of it first — the “Truthiverse”.

Photo of the Day is a BNN feature which offers a photograph on a day, and calls it “Photo of the Day”. This is not to imply that this is a regular feature, nor that this photo is truly the mother of all photos for the day in question. In this particular example, there is more than one photo, so a correct titling of the feature should really be “Photos of the Day”. However, this would become extremely confusing for branding reasons, kind of like the subject of these photos. Usual disclaimers apply.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s relax, forget our troubles, and play with our friends from the Israeli Air Force Free (dom) Game…” Visual blogger Mazen Kerbaj in Beirut publishes his cartoons and drawings at mazenkerblog.blogspot.com. This offering in the style of a children’s puzzle book, looks at what the Israeli Air Force is currently teaching Lebanese children.

The quest for defensible borders has been an axiom of Israeli governments since 1948. Defensible borders for Israel has been explicitly backed by Washington since the Reagan administration. The complete demilitarization of all countries around Israel and around those countries as well will not be enough. Defensible borders in the end would require Israel to extend its borders around the continents.

The narrator of this spot exclaims, “I was watching the news with my brother John and it was ba-ad! Israel was bombing the civilians and infrastructure of Lebanon! So we decided to do something. We decided to have a telethon to tell Israel not to bomb Lebanon. We called our favorite celebrities — Goldie Hawn, Michelle Kwan, Kofi Annan, Cheech and Chong, Pokemon, Celine Dion, Gengis Khan (maybe not Genghis Khan) …”