Iran's Khamenei nabs top spot on list of Top 10 Anti-Israel figures

Supreme leader gets dubious honor from Simon Wiesenthal Center for repeatedly calling for Israel's annihilation.

By TAMARA ZIEVE
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 521 (R) (photo credit: REUTERS)
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 521 (R)
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Number One on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's annual “Top Ten Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel List”, the Center said in an statement to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Officials from the Center expressed strong opposition to what they described as a "celebratory air" following the recent announcement of an interim agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1 in Geneva, noting that the supreme leader simultaneously continued his "genocidal vitriol" against the Jewish State.
“We are well aware that peace talks are held with your enemies and not your friends. But the next round of nuclear talks must be about the serious business of permanently crippling Iran’s capability of building the bomb,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Center’s associate dean.
“The atmospherics of smiles, warm handshakes and embraces are absolutely unacceptable and inappropriate behavior when you're engaging a regime whose Supreme leader uses every opportunity to call for the total annihilation of the State Of Israel,” the Rabbis also said, adding, “There is nothing to smile about when the diplomats who gather around the table in fact know very well that the last tyrant to make such genocidal threats, in fact put them in motion, and came very close to rendering the Jewish people extinct.”
The Top Ten List cites Khamenei’s reference to Israel as the “rabid dog in the region,” whose leaders “look like beasts and cannot be called human” among other "genocidal threats against the Jewish state."
The full list will be released at a press conference at the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance at the beginning of next week.