The Associated Press reported (over a week after other sites ran the story, although, to be fair, I hadn’t heard of it until the AP ran it) that seven seniors at La Quinta High School were facing “disciplinary action” for playing a game entitled “Beat the Jew.” According to the replies in the comments section of the HeebMagazine.com article on it, four students “created” the game on Facebook, and then 36 others joined the Facebook Page for it. Those same replies said that the participants were “tolerant, well-mannered, and intelligent,” although, based on the fallout they’ve received from it (which included special attention from the Anti-Defamation League), I’d say they’re a bunch of idiots.
Basically, the game is a modified “tackletag,” wherein one person is designated “the Jew,” blindfolded, and dropped on Highway 111. The other players are then counted as “the Nazis” and get in cars and are supposed to chase and eventually tackle the Jew (source). If the Jew loses, then he’s faced with (I shit you not) “incineration” or “enslavement.” Again, this game was invented by “tolerant, well-mannered, and intelligent” students. They’ve smartened up since they were caught, for sure: none of the students have told the press what the words “incineration” and “enslavement” would mean in the context of the game.
Something tells me "incineration" doesn't mean eating a whole box of Red Hots
A lot of the really angry internet commentary has rested solely on calling the teens anti-Semitic and then suggesting that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark (aka La Quinta High School).
But the trouble is, while the teens and their game are anti-Semitic, the high school itself seems to have really tried very hard to not be. The school had its students read Elie Wiesel’s Night in their freshman year and included talks with Holocaust survivors and trips to the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance (which sounds only slightly less boring than the Woonsocket Museum of Work and Culture). My neighborhood in Providence, RI had a large Jewish population, and a good deal of the white students at my high school were Jewish, and the most we got on the Holocaust was reading Night (in our junior year) and maybe learning about the actual event in US History. By the reasoning that the culture at La Quinta fostered the “Beat the Jew” game, then my high school ought to have looked like a real-life version of the fiction Kazakhstan in the movie Borat. For the record, we didn’t. La Quinta also had “Holocaust simulations,” which I guess is supposed to be about sensitivity training, but sounds like the inspiration for “Beat the Jew.”
No, the people who dropped the ball here were not the school administrators, but a bunch of stupid kids. And not stupid because they caught (although, really, Facebook? Why didn’t you just plaster signs all over the walls? It would’ve saved time). Few people can actually hide their prejudice, so being revealed as prejudice is a foregone conclusion. Stupid for being anti-Semitic dickwads. Stupid for thinking that anti-Semitism is synonmous with “fun.” But, see, this is the trouble with kids; Kids are stupid.
Pictured: a kid not being a genius
I could fault Facebook for allowing such an event to occur, continuing with their policy of hate speech is free speech, but really, this one isn’t Facebook’s fault. This would’ve happened without Facebook, it was just made easier by Facebook’s existence.
The blame ultimately rests in stupidity. I see this as just a symptom of a trend occurring in the country, where we justify our blatant discriminatory hate by justifying it in the name of “just having fun.” See, there’s this thin line between satire and straight up being a dickwad, and Americans increasingly have trouble discerning between the two. For instance, for people who know what satire is, Stephen Colbert is a genius who skewers Bill O’Reilly and similar right-wing pundits every night with his trademark witticisms. For people who don’t, Stephen Colbert is a hard-hitting, honest-spoken, conservative political commentator, of similar caliber to Bill O’Reilly, whose show, in a bizarre twist, happens to be on Comedy Central after liberal-love fest The Daily Show. Ironically, Bill O’Reilly himself falls into the former, rather than the latter, category.
So it’s really no surprise that four stupid kids thought this game was a good idea, and then 36 stupid others agreed with them. This is what happens when you’re stupid.
