A prosecutor in Sweden has ruled that to fly the Islamic State's black flag does not constitute a hate crime.
According to The Local, a Swedish news publication, prosecutor Gisela Sjövall revealed that she would not be prosecuting a 23-year-old man who posted pictures of the IS flag on his Facebook page in June. The man, originally from Syria, was investigated by the Laholm police for spreading hate speech.
During an interview with Swedish news agency SVT, Sjövall argued that the man is not guilty of a hate crime because IS hates everyone and does not advocate hatred for any one particular group of people. "Put simply, one can say that he is expressing contempt for 'all others,' and not against a specific ethnic group," she stated.
In an interview with the Hallandsposten newspaper, Sjövall reasoned that even though symbols like the swastika have become notorious signs of hatred toward one particular group, like the Jews, the IS flag hasn't risen to that level. Though she did confess that could change in 10 years.
"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. For me, there are no doubts about the decision not to prosecute," she explained.
As Christian Post reported, images or symbols need to threaten or degrade a particular group of people on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or sexual orientation in order to have them considered symbols of hate, as per the speech laws in Sweden.
The man in question in this case is being defended by his lawyer, Björn Nilsson, who told the Hallandsposten newspaper that the man doesn't support IS but is promoting the flag on his social media page because the black flag is a bigger symbol within Islam, known as the "Banner of the Eagle" or the "Black Standard."
According to Nilsson's testimony, "He (the man) claims that this is not an IS flag, but instead a symbol which is used within Islam, and which has been used for many hundreds of years before it was misappropriated by IS."
Throughout history there have been multiple incarnations of the "Black Standard" or the "Banner of the Eagle" over the course of time, with the earliest account being traced back to the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century. This was when the Islamic prophet Muhammad supposedly spread Islamic teachings under the "Black Standard." Heavy.com reports that the prophet obtained the idea for the banner tradition from the ancient Romans.