A citizen in Sweden began flying the ISIS battle flag and naturally he was investigated by the authorities. He was later charged with hate speech for flying the ISIS flag. Prosecutor Gisela Sjövall refused to bring charges against a 23-year-old Syrian migrant. The fact that she isn’t prosecuting him is bizarre enough but when you hear why, it’s worse. Is the ISIS flag hateful? Yes and prosecutor Sjovall agrees with that much.
But here is where she heads into the Twilight Zone. She says that the flag isn’t haste speech because he hates all other people who are not like him. In other words, he hates all others equally, therefore it’s not hate speech. She used the example of the Nazi flag, which is a poor example to use. The Nazis didn’t just hate Jews, they hated blacks, gays, Hispanics and anyone who wasn’t Aryan lily white. Therefore, there is no difference between the Nazi flag and the ISIS flag.
Sjovall said:
‘Put simply, one can say that he is expressing contempt for “all others” and not against a specific ethnic group.’
‘Up until now, we haven’t come to that point. That could change in ten years.’
‘If there had been anything in the text with more specific formulations about certain groups, for example homosexuals, the ruling could have been different.’
‘He claims that this is not an IS flag, but instead a symbol which has is used within Islam, and which has been used for many hundreds of years before it was misappropriated by IS,’ his lawyer Björn Nilsson told Hallandsposten newspaper.
The black ‘Banner of the Eagle’ was banned from a public demonstration in the Netherlands in August 2014, and is forbidden in Germany.
In October 2014 British police arrested a man, Ali Iqbal, who was flying a black Islamic flag in a shop in Walthamstow, east London.
But they dropped charges after accepting his argument that it was a traditional Islamic flag, which had been hijacked by ISIS.