World Pulls Jaw Muscle While Yawning At Beirut Bombing

New York (AP) – The world was treated for a pulled jaw muscle today after yawning at the car bombing in a Beirut suburb yesterday. Doctors at New York’s Bellevue Hospital reported that that patient was admitted to the ER, treated, and released.

A powerful explosion caused extensive damage and killed five passers by on Thursday in the Lebanese suburb of Haret Hreik, a stronghold of Hezbollah support. The bombing follows a series of similar attacks in Lebanon, in spillover from the three-year-old sectarian civil war in neighboring Syria. Opponents of the Assad regime, primarily Sunni Muslims, resent Shiite Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian conflict, exacerbating the fragile demographic tensions in Lebanon. The world, however, which would rather focus on either wresting concessions from Israel or on the new season of Downton Abbey, reacted with boredom to yet another episode of Muslim-on-Muslim violence.

Contributing to the yawn were the neverending armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan. “The world has basically resigned itself to certain populations killing each other all the time, while pretending to support democratic values,” said hospital spokesman Dr. Ray Ciszt, explaining the patient’s predisposition toward the pulled muscle. “Each time the media report further attacks in Syria, Lebanon, or even within the Gaza Strip, as long as Jews aren’t the ones pulling the trigger, the world finds it dull. Iterations of these occurrences of these incidents have strained the patient’s jaw muscles from repeated yawns.” The yawning in reaction to the latest Lebanon bombing only exacerbated the muscle strain and finally resulted in injury.

Dr. Ciszt said the world risked a similar injury to its eye muscles this year when President Obama was offering excuses and apologies for sweeping violations of privacy by the National Security Administration, and the world reacted with eye-rolling. To forestall a recurrence that would seriously injure those muscles, doctors told the world not to pay attention when Obama later had to offer a defense of the missteps in rolling out his health care initiative. The admonishment also proved helpful when the US granted major concessions to Iran on its nuclear program after more than a year of official insistence that no such developments would be tolerated.

For now, the world is being instructed to maintain its studious ignorance of international developments and domestic politics, lest further parts of its anatomy sustain harm. At particular risk, says Dr. Ciszt, is the world’s digestive system, which apparently does not have the stomach for applying actual pressure on the Palestinians.