A tweet from Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Photo: Screenshot.

As world powers praise Iran’s new “moderate” stance of President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, apparently showed his true colors on Monday, when a Twitter account  believed to be run by his office, tweeted support for a noted French anti-Semite and Muslim convert, Roger Garaudy, whose books have been banned as hate speech.

On December 16, the anniversary of the author’s most notable French trial, the account tweeted a picture from the author’s Facebook page, showing a portrait of the bespectacled older man in a three-piece suit, in front of a quote from Khamenei, himself, from 1998: “The Zionists are just like the Nazis.”

Alongside the image, there are three photos from the Holocaust, or films about it, and a recent photo, of an Arab, presumably in Israel, carrying the wounded.

In 1996, Garaudy published ‘The Founding Myths of Modern Israel.‘ The book claimed that the Jewish death toll in WWII was far lower than is widely believed, while the Holocaust, itself, as well as many of what he says are the founding notions of Israel, were myths.

Under France’s 1990 Gayssot Law, which prohibited the questioning of the existence of an event deemed as “crimes against humanity,” as defined in the London Charter of 1945, much of Garaudy’s book was shown to be illegal. His trial began in 1996 and he was convicted in 1998.

The book was banned, Garaudy was fined and he served a suspended sentence. Garaudy died in 2012.

Ayatollah Khameini’s tweet was first flagged by anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon on Monday.