someone was spray-painting "Deport the Shaw" on a lot of sidewalks around town

What a tragedy for movie-lovers that would have been!
Robert Shaw was sensational in "The Sting," and some say even better in "Jaws." He died too young.

I think they might have been demanding that all people of Shawnee extraction be forcibly evicted... haven't the Indians suffered enough?

By the way, they also bent the arms facing the wrong way. Nazi swastikas turn clockwise. A swastika with the arms turned the other way is an ancient symbol (going back at least 3000 years) denoting (or beseeching) good luck, I think. Maybe the vandal was indicating that he was a follower of some ancient pagan religion.

I vote for stupidity. On the other hand, some of 'em mean it. The last time I came across this in conversaiton I asked 'isn't it beyond the pale to call someone a Nazi whose parents survived the death camps?' only to be told 'oh, he would have been a Kapo.' That's it for these people - Republican Jew = Kapo.

Nobody knows hate like the left!

Maybe the graffito was older than you thought and it was an antisocialist slam against that old blowhard George Bernard Shaw after his visit to the US in the '20s.

Dr, you need to face your slashes the right way in your IMG SRC tag. Netscape doesn't pick them up backwards. (An amusing little irony akin to the immutable law of the spelling flame.)

Russell, both clockwise and counter-clockwise swastikas are ancient. The US Army's 45th Infantry Division used to use a clockwise swastika as its shoulder insignia! It was changed during the 1930s to the now-famed Thunderbird.

http://www.m38a1.com/thunderbirds.htm

As for the graffitto, it may or may not have been "wrong". Personally, guessing it was spray-painted, I'd imagine it was just an artifact of the process, like the squiggles and connectors in cursive writing. But there are also deliberate variations of the swastika, used in places like Germany and South Africa where the real thing was heavily regulated.

Thanks, DH, I've fixed the slashes. I seem to recall that the division with the swastika patches was formed from the Arizona and New Mexico National Guards, who chose it because it was a Navaho symbol. It's certainly a favorite symbol in Hinduism. I have seen in a college library a multi-volume series of translated Hindu classics called something like "Ancient Wisdom of the East" which had little swastikas embossed all around the cover. I believe it was published well before Hitler. Didn't he adopt the symbol as an 'Aryan' one? Not that his Aryans had much to do with the Indian kind. I didn't notice which way the book-cover swastikas were turned.

If it is to be a Nazi swastika, it is backwards, the angles bend the wrong way.

Interestingly, there have been reports of persons being upset at seeing swastikas on old buildings in the Detroit area. Buildings built before the Nazi movement in Germany came to any kind of prominence. Apparently the swastika was a native American good luck symbol. I can still recall the start I had going into the downtown office building I worked in. One morning while crossing the street I looked up at it and saw a number of swatikas worked into the facade. (It was the Penobscot Building and has a native American motif). I defy anyone to prove that a major office building built in the late 1920's in Detroit had anything to do with obscure political movements in central Europe. (Then again, I could be wrong).

That's the Vichy Swastika...it's running away.
To say that a screaming moderate like Coleman is a Nazi just drains any meaning from the word; like 'racism', it just means "we don't like you".