Itongadol/AJN.- Iran and Turkey\’s leaders take top spots, American Jewish anti-Semites also make the list.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center announced on Monday its 2013 top-10 list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs, giving the top two slots to the leaders of Iran and Turkey.
The list underlined the failure of the international community to confront contemporary anti-Semitism by citing state-sponsored drives to attack Jews and Israel and the role of a UN official, authors, academic and church groups and celebrities in stoking Jew-hatred.
The center, an international human rights organization best known for combating modern anti-Semitism and bringing World War II Nazis to justice, topped the list with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s “genocidal threats against the Jewish state.”
In November, Khamenei described Israel as the “rabid dog in the region,” adding, “Its leaders look like beasts and cannot be called human.” Khamenei said shortly before the Iranian election that “Zionists” were the real agents in control of the United States – an accusation with which he was “updating the old canard of a global Jewish conspiracy,” according to the center.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan garnered the second spot on the list for blaming the actions of the June anti-government Turkish demonstrators, who sought greater democracy, on the “interest rate lobby,” which Erdogan’s deputy said was “The Jewish Diaspora.” The Wiesenthal center said Erdogan had suggested that Israel engineered the ouster of Egypt’s Islamic president Mohamed Morsi.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday from Herzliya via telephone, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the aim of this year’s list was “to get across the point” that people who have credentials or are prime minister or the Supreme Leader should not receive free passes because of their positions of power.
“The rest of the world should not be so friendly with them. It is not correct to have meetings with the prime minister of Turkey when he is a common bigot,” Hier said.