Related" A sample of emails AAF received on our 'Arab' story. There are still good people who are reasonable and unbiased. There are also those who are hateful and racist.

SEE Bergen Record story

Paterson, August 22, 2005: We are happy to report that that word ‘Arab’ no longer conjures defamatory and offensive connotations- at least in the Online Roget's Thesaurus.  See suspect definitions below.  As first appeared in  our website, AAF called for the removal of derogatory and insulting definitions contained in the online edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. See press release below and action alert.

We contacted  Lexico, Inc, the publisher of  Dictionary.Com,  which has offcies in  California and New York.  Moreover, we apprised them of  our  serious concern about the negative implications of such unrepresentative definitions of the word Arab. See letter to Mr. Jasper Chou, Lexico’s Director of Marketing.

To demonstrate our resolve to force the company to correct the matter, AAF contacted the Associated Press and they agreed to cover the story, which will be carried by media outlets worldwide.

Now,  any visitor to the site will  find the offensive definitions have been removed. We are thankful to Lexico, for their prompt attention to our demands and we do hope that proper care and  research is completed before providing wrong and unacceptable definitions of words and terms. We still demand a public statement apologizing for the error.

 We are working with the publisher to proceed to the next step by including acceptable definitions of the word Arab, the least which a reference to anyone who speaks Arabic or traces their roots to any of the 22 Arab States.

Respectfully,

Aref Assaf, President

AAF