The Facbook login page. Photo: Wiki Commons.

A Jewish student in Melbourne was harassed with an onslaught of antisemitic social media abuse after she asked a closed group of students on Facebook to be less offensive, the UK Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

“It’s really quite rude and offensive. Again, I don’t want to get s*** for this post so please don’t comment offensive things and just think about what could offend people. Thanks,” the student, from Bialik College in east Melbourne, wrote in a closed Australian high school group on Facebook called VCE DiscussionSpace. 

But what followed the student’s plea for a more civil space, however, was a barrage of antisemitic jokes and puns about gas chambers and the Holocaust, for all 40,000 members of VCE DiscussionSpace to see.

“Jew really need to lighten up,” one student wrote. “I gas you don’t like my joke,” said another. “I apologise, please don’t be Fürhious about it,” taunted a third. Most of the students in the group are in 11th or 12th grade.

According to the Mail, the Bialik College student’s original post has since been deleted, but not before her story made the local news. Her post had apparently been in response to previous discriminatory language just a week earlier, when an Xavier College student wrote a message denigrating public school students by calling them “retarded” and “povo.”