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Yoad Winter is a Linguistics and Mathematics expert who works with computers, formerly from the Technion in Israel, now employed as an academic lecturer at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. I have elsewhere commented on the Linguistics department at Tel Aviv University and how Israeli linguists denounce and vilify Israel. Some of the anti-Israel crowd in the field of linguistics were and are groupies of the notorious neo-Stalinist Linguistic “guru” and anti-Semite Noam Chomsky. The late Tanya Reinhart, another well-known anti-Israel basher, was a disciple of Chomsky. Apparently Yoad Winter himself is a disciple of Reinhart, following in her footsteps after having studied under her.

Winter specializes in what could be called Boolean semantics, combining language with mathematical computational models to study the form and interpretation of language. The computing dictionary describes “Boolean” as “The type of an expression with two possible values, "true" and "false, as a variable of Boolean type or a function with Boolean arguments or result. The most common Boolean functions are AND, OR and NOT.”

Logic is an important part of Boolean algebra, used by Winter in his computational models about language. Again, the computing dictionary defines this logic as a “deductive logical system, usually applied to classes, in which, under the operations of intersection and symmetric difference, classes are treated as algebraic quantities.”

But when it comes to true or false values regarding Israel’s right to exist or defend itself from the Arab and Muslim fascists seeking to destroy the Jewish state, truth and falsehood seem irrelevant to Winter.

Yoad Winter, now in the comfort and safety of the Netherlands, castigates Israel for defending itself from Arab terrorism and threats of annihilation. Simply put, it’s all Israel’s fault, no ANDs, ORs or NOTs about it.

Yoad Winter belongs to a growing crowd of anti-Israel Israelis living outside Israel, and is part of a group called Gate48 in Amsterdam. During the war in Gaza he and his fellow Israeli academics and fellow travelers in Gate48 wrote the following to the Dutch government:

“We, a group of Israelis living in the Netherlands, call on you to publicly disapprove of the brutal military operation claiming the life of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. We urge you to intervene in this conflict by sending a message to the Israeli government, which denounces the attacks on Gaza, and insists on an immediate ceasefire. We are following the reports from Gaza with anger, shame and frustration at the inability of the international community to stop the violence. Since the beginning of this operation approximately 700 people, among them more than 200 children were killed. 700,000 Palestinians are living without water and nearly a million without electricity. Israel blocks the delivery of sufficient humanitarian aid, which has resulted in starvation, and a lack of proper medical assistance. We cannot find any justification for such war crimes against civilians.”

The bulk of the “700 people killed” (ultimately 1,300 claimed by the UN by war’s end) were proven to have been armed terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who used the civilian population (including children) on many occasions as human shields.

In addition, obviously 700,000 Arabs were not living without water, nor one million without electricity. Israel did not block delivery of humanitarian aid and the population in Gaza is and never has been starving. Those are the inventions of the International Solidarity Movement, a Hamas-supporting movement, and similar outfits, which consistently try to get the West to believe that Gaza is “under siege” because Israel controls the borders to stop weapons smuggling from Iran and Syria. The ISM has a strong presence in the Netherlands.

Over 1,300 Israeli trucks transported humanitarian aid to the civilians of the Gaza Strip, passing through the different crossings during Operation Cast Lead. In addition, 1,711 liters of diesel fuel for heating purposes were supplied, together with 96 thousand liters of diesel fuel for transportation purposes, 234 tons of natural gas, and 282 thousand liters of diesel fuel. Throughout Cast Lead Israel coordinated the evacuation of 382 injured Palestinians from the combat zones, in addition to 1,150 uninvolved Palestinians from those zones. Israel also facilitated the entrance of 17 fire trucks to different fire centers, and of several professional teams that took care of the repair of infrastructure problems combat zones. The evacuation of 460 Palestinian foreign nationals from the Gaza Strip to Israel through the Erez Crossing was also facilitated. The officers of the Coordination and Communication Headquarters also coordinated the transfer of 500 trucks and 131 ambulances from the northern to the southern Gaza Strip.

Yoad Winter and his friends were kind enough to acknowledge that missiles were fired on Sderot and southern Israel and graciously suggested that this was “unacceptable.” But they did not mention in their letter that this had been ongoing for 8 years, with over 4,000 rockets fired on Israeli children and other civilians who were not within the safety of the Netherlands. Their glib attitude of tolerance towards this mass terrorism is itself unacceptable.

“These must be brought to an end through a real and viable long-term political solution,” Winter writes. But have Winter and his Gate48 buddies even read the Hamas charter that openly calls for the annihilation of world Jewry and the unconditional end of Israel as a Jewish state?

While still at the Technion, Yoad Winter signed a petition (initiated in the UK, an EU country again, no less) accusing Israel of interfering with “academic freedom” in the West Bank and Gaza. According to the petition, “It is clear that there can be no real academic freedom in higher education unless it is possible to reach the institutions where one studies, teaches, and carries out research. Academics within the State of Israel are able to do this, but those working in the higher education institutions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are not. There, checkpoints, blockades, walls and fences prevent thousands of students and teachers from leading a normal academic life, and lecturers with non-Palestinian passports, who wish to teach in those institutions, are prevented from staying for long enough to carry out meaningful continuous teaching.”

Never mind that Israeli college students have been the victims of Palestinian terror and never mind that Gaza and West Bank “universities” are little more than terrorist training and indoctrination camps.

Yoad Winter surely knows that Hamas is part of the student government at Bir Zeit University along with other terrorist groups and that Palestinian colleges are used by the terrorist organizations. His objections to checkpoints and the Security Fence, which not only protect Israeli Jews but also Arab students, lack any Boolean logic.

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