In a broad swipe at the Democrat Party, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach questioned the sincerity of Democrats' statements of support for Israel given the party's backing of the nuclear deal with Iran - and warned of Hillary Clinton's ties with an "extreme anti-Semite."
Boteach spoke with Arutz Sheva on Monday during AIPAC's annual policy conference in Washington D.C.
Speaking hours prior to addresses by the three Republican presidential candidates, and just after speeches by Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, Boteach called out the "contradiction" between the latters' statements of support for Israel, and their actions in backing the Iran deal.
"They signed an agreement which legitimizes a genocidal regime which openly calls for killing all the Jews," he noted, referring to regular calls by Iranian leaders to wipe all Israeli Jews off the map.
Signing an agreement with such a country serves to legitimize those murderous statements, he said.
"It would be absurd if they had signed an agreement with a government that was calling for the extermination of any other group," Boteach continued. "It seems that only the Jews can be threatened with annihilation and that's OK."
The popular US rabbi called on presidential candidates to take a principled stand against Iran and other state sponsors of terror and oppressive regimes.
The next president should "move to indict (Iranian Supreme Leader) Ayatollah Khamenei at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for incitement to genocide, in direct violation of the 1948 anti-genocide convention, to which the United States is a signatory."
The issue is not just a narrow pro-Israel one, Boteach insisted, citing rampant human rights violations by Iran and its proxies against minorities and women, and questioning why liberal groups are so silent on the issue.
He said presidential candidates should "call out the LGBT leadership here in the United States for not protesting the slaughter of gay men and women by Hamas and by Iran hanging them from cranes."
"How was this nuclear accord signed without demanding that that kind of indiscriminate slaughter stop?" he asked. "How is it that women's leaders in the United States didn't object to the signing of the Iran deal when women are still being stoned to death in Iran?"
In contrast, he said, "Israel is a righteous and majestic democracy... in the world's most tyrannical region."
He urged presidential candidates to understand that the Israel-US alliance is more than a purely strategic one.
"This is a values debate between two cultures. Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, ISIS - they're all the same; they are cultures of death which glorify dying and getting some rich reward in heaven... and I want a presidential candidate who gets that.
"This is a values war and the United States needs to be on the side of life, on the side of Israel."
That is far from the case with Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton, he warned, citing recently released email correspondence between her and Sidney Blumenthal, a virulently anti-Israel adviser whose son Max has called repeatedly to destroy the State of Israel.
In some of the emails Clinton even praises Max Blumenthal directly for his works - which have included comparing the IDF to the Nazi SS, and calling for Israeli Jews to be ethnically-cleansed from the Middle East unless they submit to Arab domination and assimilate into Arab society.
Branding the younger Blumenthal "an extreme anti-Semite," Boteach warned of the ramifications of having a US president who counted such individuals among her inner circle.
"It is deeply disturbing."