A picture on Snapchat has made local news in the recent weeks. In the picture 3 boys are lined up and a caption reads “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” Someone ended up reporting the post and it was classified as a threat. 

Anti-Semitism has been around for a long time. Some students feel that there is still a sense of it around. 

“It’s bound to happen because there are a few kids who have a viewpoint like that,” Sophomore Romina Dadkhah said.

Many more students felt like the comment itself was a very inappropriate joke. 

“Its degrading for people who follow a religion to be joked about like that, especially Jews, who have been hunted down and killed and tortured,” Freshman Barbara Khadijah said. 

The most common reaction was that kids weren’t shocked that it happened, but rather, shocked that the kids actually got caught.  

“I was surprised but not,” Junior Jamie Ryan said. “I knew that something could happen at Creek, but I wasn’t expecting it to because it was such a big thing.”

Some kids believed that the students wouldn’t get caught because there is a huge meme culture around comments like these. Kids often just laugh stuff off like this by saying, “It’s a meme,” but jokes like this get taken seriously by law enforcement when they cross the line into hate speech or terrorist threats.

“If it was me I would get scared because kids my own age are threatening my community and my identity just because of my religion,” Ryan said.  

Some fear that these jokes could also create a following around them if they are repeated enough.

“A lot of things start out as a joke and then it turns into a lot more because it can gain following and all that,” Jewish Student Connection Club Leader Junior Naomi Presken said.  “You just really want to cut it off before anything serious happens.”

Since the post was on school property, Creek took the steps to identify and discipline the students who were involved in the post. Creek also has a large Jewish student population and those kids are automatically put in danger due to a threat. 

“I felt disappointed,” Jewish Student Connection Club Leader Senior Ali Ginsburg said. “It’s something that should never be said and having that circulated around the community just upset me a lot.”

There have also been a couple other instances of anti-Semitic behavior such as swastikas written on desks and bathroom stalls. 

“I haven’t really seen anything in the hallways,” Senior Ulviyya Sadigova said. “But that’s the thing. There are a lot of things we don’t see happening at our school.”

While these incidents weren’t public, they still might help explain why so many Creek students are not surprised when they hear of comments like this since inappropriate and sometimes hateful jokes are commonplace in hallways and classrooms.

“These kids that did it presumably thought that they were being funny,” said Scott Levin, the director of the ADL, in a Denver Post article. “It’s not just the past and the Holocaust. We’re right now in Colorado experiencing an increase in anti-Semitic incidents.”