The Jewish Protection League just put out a communiqué announcing that the swastika is no longer a Jew-specific symbol of hate, so everybody can just chill the hell out about the swastikas everywhere, because the chances are good that the swastika in question isnot even about you, if you are Jewish. But it might be about you if you are literally anything else, including Mexican or gay or Turkish or 16th Century English settlers in America or black people or cops or the Chinese or, in Russia, anybody but very white Slavic Russians. It is also commonly used as a symbol of hate against the turtle, itself a symbol of hate (in nature). Who knew that the Internet habit of calling everybody else "Hitler" would somehow spread to illiterate neck-tattooed fucktards who somehow managed to get a can of spray paint or at least a Sharpie (tm)? Is this because everybody's got the iPhones now?

Some newspaper reports:

The swastika now shows up so often as a generic symbol of hatred that the Anti-Defamation League, in its annual tally of hate crimes against Jews, will no longer automatically count its appearance as an act of anti-Semitism.

“The swastika has morphed into a universal symbol of hate,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization. “Today it’s used as an epithet against African-Americans, Hispanics and gays, as well as Jews, because it is a symbol which frightens.”

"Frightens" is kind of an inaccurate word, because nobody has been "frightened" by swastika graffiti since about 1978, but whatever. The bigger point is that you need a trash-culture forensics specialist to figure out what, if anything, the modern idiot intends when he scrawls a (usually backwards) swastika, often seconds after marking the same surface with his gang name ("George") and prepaid cell-phone number. These are just three things the guy can kind of convey through crude lines and shapes!

But unlike the New York Times, which will literally reprint any press release you send it -- after adding the names of seven or eight reporters and bureaus to the top, along with a headline like, "On Walls, New Questions About an Old Symbol" -- here at Wonkette World Headquarters we actually investigate things, using Google News.

So here's today's batch of "Oh Noes they putted a swastika somewhere" articles from the world's news media:

• In a goofy twist, some actual German people in Canada somewhere have been annoyed by swastikas painted on their car and some building (their house?) in their neighborhood. [CBC News]
• Meanwhile, in a completely different part of Canada, Chinese people are upset because swastikas have apparently been used as an anti-Chinese symbol. [Richmond Province]
• Authorities in an eastern section of Russia have banned the entirety of YouTube, because of a YouTube video featuring Russian skinheads waving swastika signs and threatening ethnic minorities in Russia. (Also Russia doesn't want any YouTube or blogs or Internet, period, because people use it to criticize the police-state kleptocracy.) [AFP]
• And in Warsaw, some troublemaker "artist" put up a banner of a hot & sexy naked Mickey Mouse, with her (?) buttocks rising provocatively in the sky, beneath a giant swastika because why not? [Christian Science Monitor]
• Most shocking of all was the use of a swastika in anti-turtle graffiti in some park in Nebraska, the midwestern state known for its simmering anti-animal hate crimes, "from the swastika on the oversized fake turtle in a park under construction in Antelope Valley to the panda somebody painted on an Antelope Valley wall last winter." What? [Lincoln Journal Star]