Since Lebanon's headlines already sound pretty ridiculous - and with increased readership of satirical news outlets and blogs (including The Pan-Arabia Enquirer and Karl reMarks, the latter being an absolute must-read for every literate Lebanese), satire has been increasingly appreciated.

Day by day, Facebook welcomes me with parody headlines. They've become so frequent that I'm beginning to confuse reality with make-believe. Not ashamed to admit it, but there are instances where I've swallowed up news satire before exploring the source, because they CAN pass as real events.

Either our World is pretty eerie, or news satirists are that good.

In my literature courses in school, I was taught to analyze satire and understand its inherent intent. Over time, I learned to love it as a literary tool and have explored it heavily in my writing.

Satire is bitter, satire is upset, satire is intelligent, and satire won't keep shut when it's supposed to.

When I arrived to Beirut, I realized how the Lebanese are naturally satirical in their witty day-to-day conversations, more than any culture I've come across.

The way I see it - it wasn't until The Onion and the likes gained readership around here that we began to mediate our bitter sense of humor into writing. And it's about time - because we're darn good at it.

On that note, I'd like to extend a warm welcome and a smirk to the newest satirical 'newspaper' in town!

Anaween Areeda (عناوين عريضة) is a freshly-launched, anonymous social presence where fake, satirical newspapers are shared. For now, they're just on Twitter and Facebook, but I'm guessing they'll launch a site sooner than later.

Their humor pokes fun at the ridiculous headlines proliferating everywhere to get you clicking links. They aren't lying, but they ain't telling the truth either. Just like...you guessed it, our actual newspapers.

They don't describe their mission much, nor themselves. This quip is all they've said:

عناوين عريضة يوميّة، نسائية رجاليّة ولاديّة

For me, it was the beautiful logo that had me perusing their page - presented on a layout accurately reminiscent of Arabic-language newspapers.






To Anaween Areeda: to be fair, the art of penning clickbait isn't easy. Also, low website traffic is pretty saddening. So, you sometimes gotta do what you gotta do...

A shoutout to my good friend Helmi for sharing Anaween Areeda with me.

You can follow Anaween Areeda on Facebook and Twitter.