If there’s one thing teens love, it’s shoving household products into their orifices to get high. But if there are two things teens love, the second one is almost definitely ISIS. At least—that’s what they think. But as it turns out, jihad is a real drag, and our lazy teens just can’t cut it. Take 16-year-old Marlin Stivani Nivarlain from Sweden, for instance. Nivarlain had run away with her boyfriend to join ISIS last May, but…she hadn’t realized what exactly it was she was getting herself into: “First it was good together, but then he started to look at ISIS videos and speak about them and stuff like that. Then he said he wanted to go to ISIS, and I said ‘OK, no problem’, because I did not know what ISIS meant or what Islam was—nothing.”
The late George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is…and realize half of them are stupider than that.” Few would ever accuse your average teenager of being an intellectual giant, but if you’re willing to drop everything travel to Syria to join a groups with ties to al Qaeda…well, you’re a very special sort of stupid…aren’t you, Cupcake?
So Ms. Nivarlain didn’t realize “what exactly it was she was getting herself into?” Did she never turn on a television or pick up a newspaper? Did she think she and her boyfriend were going to Disneyland in Aleppo? I understand that we may not be talking about someone who’s up to date on current events, but not knowing what ISIS is in today’s 24/7, information is everywhere environment? That would seem to strain credulity.
Granted, kids are wont to do stupid things, and stupid kids…well, let’s just saying you don’t want them doing your lobotomy or building your bridges, knowhutimean? What sort of hermetically-sealed bubble must one inhabit in order to be able to say with a straight face that “I did not know what ISIS meant or what Islam was—nothing?” That sort of ignorance simply defies rational understanding.
Iraqi Kurdish anti-terrorist forces rescued a 16-year-old Swedish girl from the Islamic State in Iraq, near Mosul, on Feb. 17.
The Swedish government asked the Kurdish Regional Government, which leads an semi-autonomous northern region, to help rescue Marlin Stivani Nivarlain.
“She [Nivarlain] is currently in the Kurdistan Region and is provided the care afforded to her under international law,” said the Kurdistan Region Security Council in a statement. “She will be transferred to Swedish authorities to return home once necessary arrangements are put place.”
To be fair, I suspect ISIS and other radical Islamic groups understand, at least on some level, that their recruits aren’t going to Fulbright Scholars. They prey on the disaffected, the angry, and the not terribly intellectually agile, the sort of “low information” types John Cleese once described as too stupid to know that they are, in fact, stupid.
I understand that Nivarlain is a not-too-terribly bright teenage girl with an exceedingly limited understand of…well, apparently anything. While her mother may well want her back, I’m not at all certain why Sweden would.
And you wonder why I fear for the future of humanity….
