Swedish prosecutor Gisela Sjövall recently announced that
she won’t be prosecuting a 23-year-old man who had posted the black ISIS flag
on his Facebook page last June. The man is a Syrian now living in Laholm, a
city on Sweden’s west coast. Ms. Sjövall ruled that the ISIS flag does not constitute hate speech and is
therefore legal under Swedish law.
Sjövall
stated that while the swastika had come to symbolize a hatred for Jews, the same could not yet be said of the ISIS
flag, though she added, “That could change in ten years.” Under Swedish
law, for an image or statement to represent “incitement to hatred,” it needs to
threaten or disparage a specific group of persons in connection to race, color,
national or ethnic origin, religious belief or sexual orientation. Oh, come on.
NAZI swastikas and flags of the Third Reich didn’t have text on them stating,
“We hate Jews,” either. And radical Islamists have been killing Jews, among
others, for far longer than the NAZIs did, yet the Swastika flag is verboten in
Sweden, but ISIS’s is okay? Would Ms. Sjövall rule in favor of the Confederate flag?
“If
there had been anything in the text with more specific formulations about
certain groups, for example homosexuals, the ruling could have been different,”
Sjövall remarked. “For me, there are no doubts about the decision not to
prosecute.”
“Put
simply, one can say that he is expressing contempt for “all others,” and not
against a specific ethnic group,” Sjövall explained to SVT, a Swedish Public
Television station.
So, in
her own words, inciting hatred towards all
other groups- everyone else- is not hate speech, but disparaging a smaller group is.
That’s
funnier than any Ole’ and Lena joke. Welcome to ‘reason,’ 2016 style.
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(Conservative talk show hosts have been banned from some European countries and even mild-mannered, intellectual Dennis Prager's "Prager University" videos have been banned from You-Tube...and the ISIS flag is okay on social media?)
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