Groan…

Via The Local:

A Swedish prosecutor has ruled that the ISIS flag does not constitute hate speech and is therefore legal under Swedish law.

Prosecutor Gisela Sjövall announced last week that she would not prosecute a 23-year-old man who had posted the black ISIS flag on his Facebook page in June.

Police in Laholm, a town on Sweden’s west coast, had launched a criminal investigation into the man, who comes originally from Syria, on suspicion of committing “hate speech”.

“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 broadcaster.

She said that while the swastika had now come to symbolise a hatred for Jews, the same could not yet be said of the IS flag.

“Up until now, we haven’t come to that point,” she told the local Hallandsposten newspaper. “That could change in ten years.”

According to Sweden’s hate speech laws, for an image or statement to represent “incitement to hatred”, it needs to threaten or disparage a group of persons in connection to race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religious belief or sexual orientation.