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Team Israel beats Nicaragua 3-1 after thrilling comeback in World Baseball Classic opener

MIAMI (JTA) — It was a familiar narrative: Israel, ever the underdog, was down and running out of time. Then, just when it seemed hopeless, they pulled off a thrilling comeback.

It wasn’t Purim, or Passover, or even Hanukkah. It was Team Israel’s opening game in the World Baseball Classic.

Israeli-American pitcher Dean Kremer, a member of the Baltimore Orioles, took the ball for Israel against Nicaragua Sunday in its first game of the World Cup-style tournament. Kremer kept the opposing bats quiet over four innings, striking out four while giving up three hits and one walk.

Nicaragua took the lead in the top of the fifth inning on a double from shortstop Steven Layton, who was then thrown out at third to end the inning.

Down 1-0 in the bottom of the eighth, Israel’s bats came alive at just the right time, first on a line-drive single from Toronto Blue Jays prospect Spencer Horwitz that brought pinch-runner Jakob Goldfarb in to score and tie the game.

Then, with two outs and the bases loaded, Philadelphia Phillies backup catcher Garrett Stubbs, who was playing third base for Israel, lifted the ball to left field for a game-winning ground-rule double, bringing in two runners to make it 3-1.

The entire sequence came against Jonathan Loáisiga, a member of the New York Yankees and Nicaragua’s best pitcher.

Garrett Stubbs gives Team Israel its first lead of the game in the bottom of the 8th! #WorldBaseballClassic pic.twitter.com/H4wjfoWwSQ

— World Baseball Classic (@WBCBaseball) March 12, 2023

“Coming into this, I didn’t know what to really expect, this being my first time playing for Team Israel,” Horwitz said. “It’s living up to everything that people are saying. That environment we were just in was definitely electric.”

While the Nicaraguan fans clearly outnumbered Israel’s contingent in both numbers and volume at loanDepot Park, where the Miami Marlins play, there were Israeli flags flying in the stands. And after key plays for Team Israel, the Israeli pop song “Mahapecha Shel Simcha” (“A Revolution of Joy”) blasted from the speakers.

“Playing for Team Israel, anytime I get to put on that uniform is special for me,” said Kremer, who grew up speaking Hebrew and has spent time living in Israel. “It’s like another home. So every time I get to represent it’s one of the better feelings.”

“It’s like being at home” – @DJ_KREY6 is loving seeing Israeli flags in the stands and hearing Hebrew music at the ballpark. pic.twitter.com/tRzGKdarZ4

— Jacob Gurvis (@jacobgurvis) March 12, 2023

So how did Israel pull off the game-winning rally?

“I have no idea,” manager Ian Kinsler joked after the game. “I don’t know what happened there.”

He continued: “We put up some good at bats, we were fighting. That’s what I expect of my team, is to play all 27 outs and fight until the end. Today we were lucky enough to be on the right side.”

The victory was crucial for Israel for a number of reasons.

With stiff competition in Pool D — or the “pool of death,” as Stubbs called it — any win Israel can manage is critical. Only two teams will advance to the next round. Israel will play Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, in order, over the next three days.

The top four teams (out of five) in each pool will automatically qualify for the 2026 WBC, meaning even if Israel does not advance, finishing anywhere but last will secure a spot in the next tournament, without needing to compete in the qualifying round.

“When you’re playing one game [against each opponent], as opposed to a series, anything can happen,” Kinsler said. “The team understands that. It’s not necessarily the best team that wins the game, it’s the team that plays the best that day. So we have just as good a shot as anybody and we’re gonna give our best shot and try to make things interesting in Pool D.”

One of the ways Israel is giving its all is by being creative on defense. Israel has been alternating its two catchers, Stubbs and veteran Ryan Lavarnway, behind the plate, with the other playing third base — which neither has previously done professionally.

“I think anybody on this team is willing to do whatever we need to win a game in any situation, any position,” Stubbs said after the game. “Obviously, it’s very fresh for me. I’ve never played third base ever in my life, all the way dating back to I don’t know how long, but it’s been a lot of fun.”

So far, it’s worked. But with a formidable Puerto Rico team coming up Monday night, the games will only get harder from here.


The post Team Israel beats Nicaragua 3-1 after thrilling comeback in World Baseball Classic opener appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Georgetown Newspaper Editorial Board Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide,’ Calls for Divestment

Georgetown University students on March 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Thomas via Reuters Connect

A Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper last week issued an editorial which argued that the school has been “complicit in Israel’s genocide,” describing the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated.

“There is no doubt in the mind of The Georgetown Voice‘s Editorial Board that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed The Georgetown Voice, an alternative, far-left publication founded in 1969. “There is no critical mass or breaking point at which elites — including the administrative elite at Georgetown — will suddenly reform their conscience.”

The editorial board condemned what it falsely labeled as Israel’s “decades-long settler colonial project and apartheid system” and appeared to blame the entirety of the Gaza conflict on Israel while absolving Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that started the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, of wrongdoing.

“We must ask ourselves why every person in Gaza or the West Bank does not elicit the same righteous anger (and frenzied whitewashing or bigotry and divisiveness) that erupted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the paper charged, referring to the American conservative activist who was assassinated in September. “While some — certainly not all — members of Congress have half-heartedly called for a ‘pause’ in the violence at some point, the vast majority of them were simultaneously voting to arm Israel.”

The editorial continued, “The morally bankrupt acts of our representatives made Americans complicit in this genocide. That should enrage and galvanize something in all of us. Sadly, at Georgetown, that’s not what we see.”

Capping off its philippic, the Voice broadsided the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — accusing the civil rights organization of “anti-Palestinian advocacy” and drifting “rightward … under the leadership of current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt” — and calling for Georgetown’s divestment from Israel on the grounds that Israel is an “apartheid regime” in the same mold as Afrikaner-dominated South Africa until the 1990s.

“If the school gives any weight to the values it claims to represent, it will reconsider its rejection of the divestment referendum from last spring and move to cut all ties with Israeli and Israel-supportive institutions immediately,” the Voice concluded, hinting at the expulsion from campus of Jewish groups such as Hillel and Chabad. “We do not say this lightly; taking action is challenging; however, in the face of such atrocities, there are no excuses for inaction.”

The Voice is not the first student newspaper to promote anti-Zionism while curating facts, sources, and quotes to confect a negative image of Israel.

In 2022, The Harvard Crimson, the official newspaper of Harvard University, endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.

“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step,” it said. “As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”

At Georgetown, anti-Zionism may be fostered by foreign influence in the form of exorbitant donations.

According to a report published in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) — titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” — Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades. The 132-page document revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.

“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”

The ISGAP report called on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals may threaten US interests and ideals.

“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Small said, referring to the antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker

British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect

The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.

The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.

“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”

Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.

“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”

Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.

Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.

For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”

Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.

That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”

She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.

“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”

Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”

Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”

The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.

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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism

Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.

Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.

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