I read this item in the New York Times last night and have not stopped laughing.
The bit of news is not funny and let me warn you: if you don’t love very dark humor — or if you are so shocked and grieved by the terrorist murders in Paris you can’t find relief in spontaneous laughter at any absurdity — maybe you shouldn’t read this.
But any satirist, any satirical publication like Charlie Hebdo would find meat to chew on in this one paragraph. I have bolded the key sentences:
A Marxist extremist group that took responsibility for a suicide bombing in Istanbul this week retracted its claim on Friday, saying that it had made a mistake. On Tuesday, a woman detonated explosives in a police station in Istanbul’s tourist district, Sultanahmet, and blew herself up. One police officer died in the attack and another was wounded. The outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party claimed responsibility and identified the suicide bomber as Elif Sultan Kalsen. But Ms. Kalsen’s family said that the body that was shown to them was not their daughter. On Friday, the group retracted its claim that it carried out the bombing. It said it had made a mistake because the bombing corresponded with an attack it had planned in the same area. It did not offer details about its planned attack. The Turkish news media has reported that the bomber was a Russian citizen of Chechen descent. An investigation is underway, the Interior Ministry said.
Oops. Uh…”Never mind.”
I had ten minutes of mentally writing the scenario for the subsequent “Marxist extremist group” conference cum Abbott and Costello routine, and hope the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are doing the same thing.