Did you join any terrorist organizations with the intent to become a glorified concubine when you were 16, because I surely didn't. This goes well beyond the normal category of "Stupid shit teens do".
Indeed.
You guys are all fucking idiots if you think they are evil and wanted to join evil. [...]
But either way grow the fuck up assholes.
Yikes. Settle down will you?
You think that because you read something and believed it that you know better than them?
Yes.
They chose to believe the other side of the story.
That's what makes them stupid. If they were 10 or at the most 12, I'd feel more sympathetic. But 16 and growing up in the UK? Please.
If what you (impersonal you here) hear about a group from a wide array of media sources is that they're genocidal, misogynist monsters and terrorists, and you just choose to believe "the other side" without evidence, that makes you appallingly stupid. I mean I can understand giving the benefit of doubt, you might think "this could just be propaganda to make them look bad". But when the charges are so monstrous, you'd still, you know, investigate, just in case, maybe? And then see that ISIS publishes beheading videos themselves, and that the evidence of their atrocities is overwhelming. And then you'd go "ummm better not risk it in case there's a hint of truth to it", yes?
Unless, of course, you're a very stupid person, in which case yeah, you might choose to plug your ears, go "LA-LA can't hear you!", and then go out of your way to fly out of your country and not even investigate the claims against them, but actually join and marry into this group. You have enough low cunning and worldliness to travel to a dangerous war-torn country by yourself, unaccompanied by an adult, so clearly you aren't a completely helpless ignorant child being swept away by events beyond your control. Yet you choose to use this low cunning to join the most infamous terrorist group of our age. Yeah... OK. The complete and utter lack of critical thinking on display is nothing short of staggering.
I'm sure you're right in that they were rationalizing everything and were being lied to, but that doesn't make them less stupid. You might argue they could still deserve sympathy, but I'd have to disagree there. Empathy, maybe. Sympathy? Very debatable.
If propaganda was that black and white, as some of you are referring to it as, WWII would have never happened because the german people should have been like "no, we are not joining your evil organization"
but guess what a whole fucking country of pretty smart people was fooled.
Why are they not comparable? It's a tyrannical organization brainwashing people into thinking they're fighting for a cause while unknowingly pushing a terrible agenda for the highest officials. Give me a legit reason that I can't compare them the way I am.
Context and circumstances matter here. People living in WW2-era Germany did not have access to the Internet. Many lived harshly through the depression and economic sanctions of post-WW1, information was controlled far more rigidly, the nazis were good at hiding their crimes (they didn't brag about it on videos that they published themselves) from both their own people and the outside world, they were oppressing their own people living there, and so on. Even during WW2 I don't know of many Jews or other minorities
from outside of Germany who decided, hey, Nazi Germany sounds awesome, let's go there and join them and possibly marry their allegedly genocidal and SS leaders.