At 1 AM on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s Twitter account followed about ninety users, mostly Israeli embassies and government work accounts. But he also became the fifteenth follower of @PersianHotBook, “the first library of hot sex books [in the] Persian language.”

Ilan Ben Zion and Gavriel Fiske broke the story in The Times of Israel on Sunday morning. There Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Prime Minister’s office, remarked, “I’m glad to say the Prime Minister’s Office has no connection to this.”

“It was a malfunction and the issue will be checked. In any case, the account was removed immediately,” the Likud party said on Twitter, according to reporter Chico Menashe of Israel Radio.

But it didn’t stop Bibi’s critics from gloating:

Lots of eyes were on Netanyahu after he was profiled in the New York Times on Saturday (with a headline suggesting he was “lonely” …in his political position against Iran’s nuclear weapons). But his Twitter fame grew last week after an interview with BBC Persian TV, in which he said,”I think if the Iranian people had freedom, they would wear jeans, listen to Western music, and have free elections.”

Jeans are not outlawed in Iran, and Western music is commonly downloaded. This line was part of a larger speech encouraging the Iranian public to oppose the nation’s nuclear program, and characterizing the Iranian government as a totalitarian government: “You, the Persians, will never get rid of this tyranny if it is armed with nuclear weapons.”

The Twitter community, angry at the way he’d spoken about Iranian leaders and eager to prove his remarks were dated and condescending, began to send Netanyahu photos of their jeans.

Of course the story goes deeper than denim. Max Fisher of the Washington Post explains:

Even if Netanyahu were the sort of person who could compellingly speak directly to Iranians, and even if Iranians were ready to hear him out, the Israeli leader’s message here may not have been the sort of language likely to bring the two sides together. That goes beyond jeans, although the flub was part of it. . . The Islamic Republic has some of the world’s worst civil rights, but it is a far cry from Pyongyang’s style of rule, and is not peopled with 78 million Iranians just waiting to be liberated. . . .

It’s a telling little irony that, when Netanyahu criticized Iran’s severe restriction of civil liberties, it led Iranians not to criticize their government but Israel’s — and to do it using the very social networks, such as Facebook, that are banned by Tehran. This was a relatively minor misstep in public diplomacy, but it’s a worrying indication for Washington and Tehran of the sort of role that the Israeli leader sees himself playing in their burgeoning outreach.

Here’s the last word from Twitter: