Some call Confederate flag American version of swastika

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ATLANTA — Whether placing Confederate flags on the grounds of the Baptist church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor was a hate crime or simply hateful, the key word is “hate.”

And that’s why many believe that controversial part of the symbol can no longer hide behind Southern heritage. The battle flag, while embraced by many, also has become an anathema to many others for its use as a toxic weapon of hate and terror.

The latest victim is Ebenezer Baptist Church, the civil-rights holy ground of King’s home church. Police say two suspects used the cover of night to hide their cowardice.

“This is the same as a swastika on the campus of a Jewish temple,” said the church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock. “This is an act of domestic terrorism.”

And Warnock is not alone in his comparison of the Confederate flag to the swastika, a symbol thousands of years old that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Council of Conservative Citizens, whose beliefs Charleston, S.C., church shooter Dylan Roof subscribed to; the League of the South; and some chapters of the Ku Klux Klan are among the American far-right groups that have commandeered the Confederate battle flag as their symbol, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center

“There’s part of ADL that feels like it represents a hate symbol no different than a swastika,” said Director Mark Moskowitz of the Southeast region of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that combats anti-Semitism. “But (there’s) also a deep recognition within ADL, the civil-rights portion of ADL, that sees it as nothing but a hate symbol.

“And the government shouldn’t be in the business of displaying hate symbols,” he said.

Just as it’s illegal to display a swastika in Germany, some believe that the Confederate emblem also should be forbidden to fly in public anywhere in the United States. Officials at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Southern Christian Leadership Conference had a press conference Friday to reiterate their demand that Confederate flags be removed from all public properties.

“The people who represent the Confederacy really were traitors,” said Charles Steele Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “It was treason that they were trying to do, and if any other group or ethnicity of people would have done this, they would either have been lynched at that time or they would’ve been deported from this country.”

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