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

The UK Foreign Office slammed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for offensive online behavior, with a harshly worded statement, after The Algemeiner on Tuesday published an article on the Twitter account  believed to be run by his office, tweeting 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.

To say the least, the UK Foreign Service was not impressed by the Ayatollah. “We deplore the tweet. The comments to which it referred were highly objectionable and offensive,” a Foreign Office spokesperson said, in a harsher statement than usual, according to the UK’s Jewish News.

Jewish News contributor Rabbi Zvi Solomon said: “All Jews long for a return to Zion, that’s at the core of our prayers. In that sense all Jews are Zionists. The comparison of the Jewish liberation movement with Nazism is hateful… has this man ever been to Auschwitz?”