After news of a Greenpoint jewelry store selling swastika earrings made news yesterday, area politicians wasted no time heaping on the outrage. It's good red meat for the base, but there's just one problem: the symbol—which as we noted yesterday, predates the Nazis by thousands of years—isn't the same one that Hitler used. There has been plenty of analysis about this, but if you look closely (below), the differences are undeniable. Whereas the Nazi symbol is angled in the shape of a diamond, the symbol when used in Tibetan Buddhism is oriented as a square. And, more importantly, the branches of the symbol are reversed for the Nazi sign. But whatever, outrage!
City Councilman Steve Levin called on the shop to stop selling the earrings, calling them "totally outrageous. The fact that a young person can walk into a store in Greenpoint and spend $5.99 on a pair of swastika earrings only serves to promote and extend the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in New York. I won’t stand for this in my neighborhood or in my district and I am calling on Bejeweled and all other City retailers who sell these earrings to remove them from your shelves and help us remove the hate from our City." And Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer—who as you may know is going to run for mayor—unleashed this blistering statement:
Yesterday my office chronicled nine egregious hate crimes that have taken place in the last three months. Today we learn that a Brooklyn jewelry store is openly selling swastika earrings. Let me be clear - a swastika is not a fashion statement. It is the most hateful symbol in our culture, and an insult to any civilized person. It has been reported that owners of this store see no reason as to why the sale of swastika earrings would be offensive - that is in unbelievably poor judgment and shocking to the sensibilities of all New Yorkers. I demand the store recall these earrings immediately and without haste.
Today a Bejeweled manager tells us, "This earring is a Buddhist symbol from India." Asked if they have any more in stock, the manager said, "No, I don't want to make trouble. If people don't like it, I'm not going to carry it." But State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) is not placated by the manager's little semiotic facts. "It’s sick. It’s insulting. It’s degrading,” Hikind tells the Daily News. "The average person, when they see a swastika, they see it as a symbol of hate. End of story." Chalk up another one for the average persons, New York!
