Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wins first place in the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Top 10 Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Slurs List of 2013. Photo: SWC.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angles-based Jewish human rights group, on Monday released its “Top 10” anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs from 2013, featuring many stories covered by The Algemeiner this year.

The organization has used its wide following of supporters — some 400,000 households in the U.S. — to give voice to its objections and to condemn these public figures who have slandered Jews and the Jewish state.

Heading the SWC’s list was Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini “for his unabated public slurs and genocidal threats against the Jewish State,” which he referred to as the “rabid dog in the region” whose “leaders look like beasts and cannot be called human.”

The SWC said, “Throughout 2013, as the US conducted secret talks with Tehran, the Ayatollah’s anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate flowed unabated. On the eve of Iranian elections, Khamenei declared, ‘Zionists’ were the real power in the United States, updating the old canard of a global Jewish conspiracy.”

Second on the list was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan whose tenure “has been marked by extreme animus toward Israel, historically Ankara’s strategic friend and trading partner,” SWC said.

Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, was ranked third for his recent statement accusing Israel of “genocidal” intentions.

The American Studies Association was fourth for voting in December “to malign the only true, free society left on the map of the Middle East,” while “the whole Arab world is going up in flames,” the SWC said, describing their vote to boycott Israeli academics as “an act of infamy; not only attacking Israeli academic institutions- but Jews everywhere.”

The United Church of Canada won fifth place for endorsing “the boycott of Israel – the only Middle East state that guarantees full religious freedom and protection to all faiths. Such blatantly unfair moves hinder hopes for peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land and have the potential to poison interfaith relations in Canada,” the SWC said.

Former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters was voted sixth on the list because he “serially slanders Israel as an apartheid state, compares it to Nazi Germany and denies that the Iranian regime poses any threat to the Jewish State. At a time of resurgent anti-Semitic hate crimes in Europe, Waters used his status as a musician to denigrate Judaism when he affixed a Jewish star on a floating pig during his summer concert tour across the continent. Depicting Jews as pigs dates back to deeply-rooted medieval anti-Semitic canards. The Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, denounced Waters for his display of, ‘unrestrained anti-Semitism,'” the SCW said.

The Hungarian extremist Jobbik party was seventh on the list for fueling anti-Semitism in European political discourse.

Eighth place was awarded to the concept of  “Hitler as a Hero,” manifesting itself throughout the Arab world in 2013. “Haters of Israel and the Jewish people often turn to the image and words of Nazi mass murderer, Adolf Hitler. ‘Hitler was right’ has emerged as a rallying cry not only for neo-Nazis but increasingly among some Arabs and Muslims,” the SWC said. It cited praise for Hitler in news stories about Lebanese singer Najwa Karam, on the “Arabs Got Talent” television show; a televised interview by Dutch social worker, Mehmet Sahin, of Dutch Muslim teens; Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Yusuf al Qaradawi; and Iraqi cleric Qays bin Khalil al Kalbi.

Rounding out the list were the resurgence of anti-Semitic cartoons and the Pine Bush School District, in upstate New York, where students report frequent abuse, including one girl having a swastika drawn on her face, a Jewish boy beaten with a hockey stick and others forced to endure Nazi salutes on their daily bus rides.

European Sport Venues, where anti-Semitic salutes and chants have become widely reported in 2013, were also named and shamed on the list.

The SWC called out American authors Alice Walker, with her new book ‘Pin in the Cushion,’ and Max Blumenthal‘s ‘Goliath’ as having been offensive to Jews and Israel because of their mainstreaming of hatred through these works.