Sweden Highly Paranoid: Cops Mistake ’21st’ Birthday Balloons For ISIS Propaganda

With the current threat faced by cities in Europe having large Muslim populations, it’s understandable that some people, mainly police officers, are more than a little edgy these days.

However one country, Sweden, has to take the prize for the most highly paranoid of all, as Sarah Ericsson from Blekinge Institute of Technology in southern Sweden who just celebrated her 21st birthday will tell you.

As she sat there in class on Monday, having left her boyfriend Fabian Åkesson at her apartment, she was shocked to receive a phone call from him informing her that the police were there.

And why were the police there? Because a passer-by who looked through Ericsson’s window spotted two balloons, one a number “1” and the other a number “2,” which the suspicious and over-paranoid passer-by thought was some kind of ISIS propaganda, as in “IS.”

The shocked Ericsson made a very fair, very reasonable and very Swedish comment to the media, saying, “We understand why someone would report it if they thought it looked like IS-propaganda, although everyone else just thought it looked like the number ’12’ from outside.”

For his part, the innocent boyfriend, Fabian, said he was standing, brushing his teeth on Monday morning, looking out of the window, when he spotted a number of cop cars outside and then heard a loud knock at the door.

When the three officers saw Fabian brushing his teeth, and then saw the balloons they realized that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, “I laughed about it and they showed me a photo that they had taken where from their perspective, it did almost look like the letters IS.”

Amazingly, the police required that the balloons be removed from the window in order to avoid any “further misunderstandings,” to which the birthday girl said,” Extremism should always be taken seriously, and we did take the balloons down immediately.”

The whole incident, while funny in some ways, highlights the real situation in Sweden, a country paranoid about Islamic extremism to the point where balloons numbered one or two are to not be displayed in people’s windows, lest someone think it’s an ISIS birthday party going on.

Sad, but true.