A few years ago, a parent of Indian background complained to public-school administrators in Fairfax County, Va., that the swastika—an ancient symbol of good fortune in Hindu and Buddhist culture—had been wrongly tarnished through appropriation by Nazi Germany. Its classroom portrayal in that light was unfair, he insisted.

Poor man.

Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party had not only appropriated a cherished sign of his heritage but transformed the swastika into a marker of national-racial superiority and murderous intolerance. Something nearly identical also relates to the keffiyeh, originally a Bedouin Arab headdress.

Of the swastika, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that the Nazis meant it to invoke a pure “Aryan racial” identity. The swasti

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