Can You Spell Bigoted?

Can You Spell Bigoted? Miriam Mogilevsky "Zionists' relentless attempts for world domination may lead to a new Jewish holocaust." "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 to respond 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 Forbes Magazine, and has been “recommended” by the Washington Post. The site is clear and well-designed, and looks professional. However, as recently as last June, any of YourDictionary.com's 100,000 daily visitors could look up a word and find example sentences like the three listed above. The definitions of words like “holocaust”, “apartheid”, and “occupation” were technically correct, but the writers' opinions were also clearly defined in the sentences 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 “to swindle; cheat; gyp”. Maybe I'm just naïve, but I never knew that the name of my religion 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 for better terms from someone in a business transaction, esp. in a petty or niggardly way.” 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 usage examples above have been gathered from various sources to reflect current and historical usage. They do not represent the opinions of YourDictionary.com." According to the site's “About” page, its definitions are "exclusive Webster's New World dictionary definitions". In July, Ami Isseroff found out about this and wrote a post on the ZioNation blog about it. He listed examples of YourDictionary.com's antisemitic sentence examples and definitions, and posted contact info for the site's administrators so

that the blog's readers could ask that the antisemitic material be taken down. In the post, he advised, “Do not accuse them of 'anti-Semitism,' even if it is obviously true. Anti-Semites know what they are, but of course they will deny it.” The CEO of YourDictionary.com, Howard Love, responded promptly and responsibly by removing most of the offensive material. In a comment on the ZioNation blog, he explained that the sentence examples had been chosen by computer. “We were fortunate in that the CEO was cooperative and responsive,” says Ami Isseroff. “The problem, according to him, was due to use of a mass text database for the examples, evidently culled from the Web. If that is true, what it shows is that anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric have thoroughly permeated the Web.” Ami goes on to point out that although he has not studied the problem in detail, he has not noticed such antagonism against any other group in the world. “The Web community and modern culture have developed a level of tolerance for abuse of Israel, Zionism and Jews that goes beyond that for any other group, it seems,” he added. Meanwhile, the strange definitions of the word “Jew” remain on YourDictionary.com, and, curiously, the word “antisemitism” is not defined in the dictionary. We're used to seeing biased Wikipedia articles, blog posts, Youtube videos, and Facebook groups, but dictionary definitions are a new way to spread misinformation about Jews and Israel. And that's the unfortunate thing about the Internet: anyone can state a falsehood in Wikipedia with anonymity and impunity, and the same goes for dictionary definitions. I can't imagine reading something like this in a printed, published dictionary, because the authors would probably lose their jobs. For anyone who just needs to find some definitions and isn't planning on learning about Zionism or Israel's policies towards Palestinians, YourDictionary.com is a perfectly adequate reference tool...but I think I'll stick with my trusty MerriamWebster's.