Swedish prosecutor rules IS flag not a hate symbol

A Swedish prosecutor dismissed a complaint against a Muslim man who had an IS flag as his Facebook profile picture, saying that the display did not constitute a hate crime.

Prosecutor Gisela Sjövall determined last week that the black-and-white banner expresses enmity to everyone who is not part of the terrorist organization, and is therefore not racist against any specific group.

“Put simply, one can say that he is expressing contempt for “all others,” and not against a specific ethnic group,” Sjövall told Sweden’s SVT news.

It is an offense to incite racial hatred in Sweden and Nazi symbols are banned, but according to this ruling waving an IS flag does not contravene the law.

“If there had been anything in the text [posted alongside the flag] with more specific formulations about certain groups, for example homosexuals, the ruling could have been different,” Sjövall said. “For me, there are no doubts about the decision not to prosecute.”

Curiously, the 23-year-old Syrian immigrant told police he does not support IS. He claimed that the flag does not solely represent IS but goes back to the earliest days of Islam when early Muslim armies used predominantly black-and-white flags.

The flag is banned in Germany and the Netherlands. In 2014, the UK’s then-prime minister David Cameron suggested that anyone flying the flag should be arrested, but Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, when he was mayor of London, opposed this. “I don’t like people carrying the ISIS flag… I think a balance has got to be struck,” he said. “We live in a free country and I think you’d have to have primary legislation to designate certain bits of iconography as being illegal. It would be quite difficult.”