Is this anti-semitism?

we played smear the queer in the 80s and I did not have the slightest idea what a queer was

was this an everybody thing? thought it was just me.

also had smear the queer

i never played it though, it was sort of taboo, 'unsafe', for older boys, etc. and i also didn't know what queer was even though i was one.

Smear the queer was banned in my school, but there was a brief period where my friends and I played it after school. I was always the queer! I didn't even know it was supposed to be offensive until one day I went home and told my mom what we had been playing. We came from a good progressive neighborhood, so it was obvious we'd have to change it. From there on out, we played Stymie the Hymie.

I didn't learn that name for the game until I moved to Georgia as a teen, by which time I knew that it was a slur. in FLA it was Kill the Carrier.

Does anyone remember how the game worked, i.e. how the "queer" was chosen? My memories of the game are very vague, except feeling like there was something menacing about it and not really wanting to play.

i remember it very clearly and enjoyed it heartily as a rambunctious 7 year old. the teacher had all the kids mob up and they threw the ball in the middle and whoever got it took off running in one direction.

^ that's how i remember the rules, such as they were. a nerf football is thrown or kicked & whoever catches it gets mobbed by everyone else. you could throw the ball away to avoid getting pigpiled, but having it was both goal & curse, so everyone was trying to grab it. fun, brutal game. and, yeah, we always called it smear the queer. this in the DC suburbs, mid-to-late 70s.

v familiar with this game, def played it, also known as Kill the Pill etc.

We called it Smear the Queer too but we were elementary students in a glorified farm town before the invention of the internet. This guy I overheard was a 50-something lifetime New Yorker.

really thought this was a "just me" thing

http://ask.metafilter.com/284756/Do-kids-still-play-a-game-they-call-smear-the-queer
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40545754?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://ittakesateam.blogspot.com/2010/12/smear-queer-when-tradition-needs-to-be.html

in even more pernicious childhood memories, i also recall a grammar school varietal of freeze tag in our recently segregated school called "run nigger run" where whoever was 'it' had to keep running until they tagged someone else or couldn't run any more and if they stopped they were out. then the teacher (or was it the oldest or strongest boy? i only remember it was someone in a position of primacy) would tag another kid, yell "run nigger run" and then that kid is it and we all kept playing until no one could run anymore, last man standing wins. i liked to run a lot and i was pretty good at it. Came home one day after i won to proudly tell my parents and that's when i found out that was a word we weren't supposed to say. after that i didn't play that game anymore. at some point our school followed suit; i don't remember when it stopped but it was after fourth grade.

i'd check to see if this was a 'just me' thing as well, but damned if i'm gonna google that. i have a sad roster of grammar school bigotry stashed in my memory; i imagine that's common for all gen-xers and peripheral 80's babies.

this is maybe a different thread

it's super obvious in retrospect but "smear the queer" was essentially a tool to teach gut response mob reactions to seven year olds

i've told myself i won't watch holocaust movies any more but this one looks interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYcx43AmAyY

when i first saw the trump jewish star thing my impression was that i could easily see why ppl would be offended but the six-sided star icon itself is generic enough that i assumed it was much ado about nothing. obviously that changed when i learned its provenience (and when david duke praised it), but it does make me wonder about the right-wing and jew baiting in general. like overt hate (pictures of jewish journalists superimposed over gas chambers, or the obnoxious "oy annudah shoah" meme) is easy to recognize. when it comes to israel it's a whole other thing (trying to determine to what extent israel or zionism is acting as a stand-in for jews, and what kinds of criticisms are designed to exploit that ambiguity), but then there's this thing where it's like "is it a dog whistle or isn't it" - even the covering up of the star with a circle that doesn't cover all the points - it seems like duke is reading that as a comment itself "revealing the hidden hand" that i guess is hiding behind the circle. surely they could've just covered the whole thing up? idk this probably sounds weird coming from me but i feel like maybe i haven't been sensitive enough to this kind of thing? maybe bc of the recent star of david apparel thing i felt more conflicted? but that one was clearly a sheriff star bc of the rounded points whereas this one doesn't even have that (and that one actually looked like concentration camp clothing whereas this one was just red -- i joked that maybe red bc "communism" and jews but who the fuck really even knows - i know i don't want to spend my life trying to figure it out tho). anyway, i know this long paragraph doesn't have much of a point - just thinking out loud.

fwiw, as an outsider who occasionally thinks fear of anti-semitism is (understandably) paranoid this seemed like an obvious dog whistle to me

I feel some conflict about situations like these because there's always this feeling for me that, if it really is a dog whistle for the right wing fringe that already believes what it believes, but doesn't convey any particular message to anyone else, does blowing it up into a huge media event actually benefit anyone? I guess to the extent it hurts Trump, it does, but I'm not sure whether it actually hurts Trump.

I think it's complicated with Trump because he's both a) clearly a bigot and b) clearly a hapless moron who just reposts things he agrees with without considering the source or any subtext and then doubles down on the pathetic excuses because he is congenitally incapable of apologizing or admitting that he made a mistake. But because a) is a thing, I feel like it's totally acceptable to assume a) even if it's actually b).

Sometimes the line between heartfelt bigot and opportunistic bigot is very blurry. I think he's more the latter, but that's been true of many dangerous demagogues.

As has been discussed elsewhere, the heartfelt vs opportunistic bigot distinction is one without a difference.

welp
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/jared-kushner-family-trump-holocaust-225210#ixzz4DjbgmrB1

Jacob Schulder, another cousin, went even further in a comment on Marc Kushner’s post, writing: “When an out of touch with reality nominee hires an out of touch with reality campaign manager, who is also a son­-in-­law, you get the BS Jared wrote. I don't think Trump is an anti­Semite; I think he's a lying idiot (among other things) with little to no experiences outside his teetering fiefdom of failed development projects, divorces, bankrupted sports leagues, fraudulent "Universities" and golf courses (and the list keeps going). The very first thing a responsible campaign manager should do, I'd think, and I mean the very first thing, would be to take away his father-­in­-law's Twitter account. Even Joseph Kushner would've had the street smarts to figure that one out while living on boiled potatoes in the forest.”

O_O

this is pretty o_0, from old Vanity Fair article from the 1990

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmxP-vaWAAA3d8D.jpg:large

I would never read them just channel them

"I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish." !!!

well he does work at Paramount, which is staffed entirely by Jews, dontchaknow. Honest mistake!

i wonder if right-wing jews who keep defending trump would also vote for david duke if he were the R nominee.

Certainly the neocons would all be voting HRC I'd have to think

i think so - but the neocons were dems originally anyway so the movement historically isn't dogmatically partisan

i'm thinking more about the jewish republicans posting on every forward / tablet / haaretz / jpost article about trump + antisemitism defending him

ugh is that really a thing

does this mean I finally have an opportunity to throw the "self-hating Jew" accusation back at right-wing Jews

the big deflection today is that hillary is apparently best friends w/ max blumenthal so obviously trump is the better choice for jews (nevermind that her campaign denounced his wiesel comments yesterday)

Man, that Jacob Schulder quote is hall of fame.

yeah p blazing

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmxP-vaWAAA3d8D.jpg:large

the thing this, i absolutely believe that trump kept a copy of hitler’s speeches but didn’t read them. do you think he reads anything longer than a page or two?

Just skips to the good bits.

imo he believes in the power of totems -- gold-plated everything means you're rich, marrying models means you're attractive, lots of yelling while standing near Hitler books means you're consolidating power like a fascist dictator

taking lots of diet pills for energy means you are young and vigorous

best thing about that story is the guy named Marty who works in Hollywood turning out not to be Jewish.

he really doesn't wanna let this go, huh

by my theory, he will have an event in a bank or in hollywood to show he is a friend of the jewish people

gold-plated everything means you're rich

tbf

Or, like the cubic zirconium cuff links he hands out, the color of gold alone denotes wealth.

don't think he understands the diff between "gaudy" and "rich"

https://frinkiac.com/gif/S03E19/286826/292632/

https://frinkiac.com/gif/S03E19/286826/292632.gif?b64lines=

"you know how much of a fan of the jewish people i am...
*pulls strange orange penis out, brandishes it to camera*
... i'm circumcised! you can't BEAT THAT for jewish."

Polish soccer fans torch 'Jewish' effigies, fly banner calling for burning of Jews

this is nuts. & this article says that this happens in the UK also, with Tottenham Hotspur ? "just a bit of fun"? awful.