MondoWeiss revives the poison balloon story

I missed it at the time, but on August 4th the MondoWeiss blog revived the poison balloon story, the same day Weiss himself posted admitting he was wrong about the now-famous border-incident tree's location. From a post entitled "The Lebanese Army finally acts to protect Lebanon’s sovereignty":

Israel has violated the ceasefire with Lebanon over 7,000 times since the end of the 2006 war on Lebanon . . . Dropping poisonous balloons over Southern Lebanon causing 8 people to be rushed to the hospital after inhaling toxic fumes.

The MondoWeiss post links to the original Naharnet story. By the time of this Naharnet story it was clear that they were just helium balloons from a promotional event of the Ha'ir newspaper. Just for fun, let's revisit the Fars News story "Israel Massacres Lebanese by Poisonous Balloons" (the image from the Fars story graces the top of this post):

Genocide by poisonous balloons is the new method employed by the Israeli army for killing people in southern Lebanon.

FNA dispatches from Beirut said that the Israeli planes have so far dropped thousands of these balloons all across the woods and coastal areas in southern Lebanon.

The balloons which come in bright and child attractive colors have been observed specially in Nabatieh, Sour and the surrounding villages and, of course, in Beirut.

The balloons read such phrases as 'Happy Birthday' or 'Happy Night' in English and Hebrew . . .

The Israeli army has a long record of massacring civilians with bombs placed inside dolls, mobile sets and similar objects . . .

I searched for the word "balloon" in the 134-post comment thread of the MondoWeiss post. Did the whole MondoWeiss crowd really not notice? Yaacov Lozowick noted the post on August 6.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad