Can You Spell Bigoted?
Miriam Mogilevsky
"Zionists' relentless attempts for world domination may lead to a new Jewishholocaust.""Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.""The Israeli occupation will never respect the human rights or civil rights of the people."
Most of us are, unfortunately, familiar with such statements. We've had torespond to them, clarify them, and sit in class with people who support them. These three sentences could've come from an anti-Israel Facebook group or blog,but they didn't. They came from an otherwise reputable online dictionary called YourDictionary.com.According to the site, it was chosen for a “Best of the Web” award from ForbesMagazine, and has been “recommended” by the Washington Post. The site is clearand well-designed, and looks professional.However, as recently as last June, any of YourDictionary.com's 100,000 dailyvisitors could look up a word and find example sentences like the three listedabove. The definitions of words like “holocaust”, “apartheid”, and “occupation”were technically correct, but the writers' opinions were also clearly defined in thesentences following them. The bigotry doesn't end there, though. If you look up “Jew” on YourDictionary.com,the first entry says that this word is a transitive verb, and defines it as “toswindle; cheat; gyp”. Maybe I'm just naïve, but I never knew that the name of myreligion is a verb. Besides, shouldn't the noun form, used much more frequently,be listed first? The next entry tells me that to “jew someone down” is to “get or bargain forbetter terms from someone in a business transaction, esp. in a petty or niggardlyway.” The last entry for Jew is the noun, the only correct use of the term. The statement at the bottom of the site's home page says, "The word usageexamples above have been gathered from various sources to reflect current andhistorical usage. They do not represent the opinions of YourDictionary.com."According to the site's “About” page, its definitions are "exclusive Webster's NewWorld dictionary definitions".In July, Ami Isseroff found out about this and wrote a post on the ZioNation blogabout it. He listed examples of YourDictionary.com's antisemitic sentenceexamples and definitions, and posted contact info for the site's administrators so
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