So I missed the news article about it being taken down. So sue me, smartass.
How about you admit when you're wrong instead of trying to be right all the time? You can't expect to have a reasoned discussion if you're going into it with an attitude like that. If you don't want to have a reasoned discussion, and go into it like people like TH do (saying what they think until they're blue in the face and ignoring evidence / arguments to the contrary), then by all means feel free, but I'm not interested in listening to people ranting with their fingers in their ears.
It's not just the fact that you were wrong about thinking the flag was still up, your argument has been that the UK is going to tolerate itself out of existence. If the flag stayed up, then while your point was a touch hyperbolic to say the least, it's a potentially valid argument standpoint. However, "flag that people have issues with gets put up, taken down a few days later" isn't a scenario that your argument can get its teeth into.
Because I give people the benefit of the doubt. Read the quotes in the article of the OP, quite a bit different from the NJ guy.
IMO they're just as ambiguous. One guy feels the need to hang a flag up that he knows could be misconstrued but gets his wording right, a group of guys do the same thing but don't,
is a way of looking at it. While I'm only slightly more inclined to give the NJ guy the benefit of greater doubt, IMO there's little point in making a distinction because actions speak louder than words. The action in both cases is ONLY hanging a flag, which imparts very little information.
The "are you Jewish" wording is also ambiguous in its intent, because if the Poplar guys hung the flag as a protest about what's going on in Gaza, then it's plausible that they could have confused say Zionism (AFAIK) with Judaism, and so it would possibly matter to them whether someone is Jewish when they're asking questions.
We already have by consensus. How many swastikas do you see in common designs... anywhere? And I'm not talking buried in some other pattern, I'm talking isolated, complete swastikas. You'll be hard pressed to find them.
Considering that the Swastika was generally used in conjunction (pre Nazi era) with other symbolism (such as the Buddha or other symbolism commonly associated with encouraging peace), your question is pointless, but I've seen Swastikas in the UK with four dots between the lines in the centre of the symbol (which isn't associated with the Nazis). I think a hippy was wearing something with it the last time I saw it (PS, I'm in my thirties).
But to answer your question another way, I would only expect a complete idiot to start harassing some hippy because they had a visible Swastika on them. I wouldn't expect such an idiotic occurrence in say central London, but vaguely possibly (but still very unlikely) if one goes into poorer urban areas.
The problem in either case is the context, the flag is just a flag. People are likely to choose to read its presence depending based on their personal bias. Judging by this thread, lots of that around. A Swastika symbol that looks like the Nazi one in its style and say adorning the outfit of a skinhead is somewhat different to a Swastika that a hippy might have on their outfit.
And no, the OP is not an example of how a flag has directly caused religious violence, because there's no evidence of it causing that in Poplar, I think that's an example of your personal bias at work.
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