(JTA) — Dozens of Tunisian Islamists protested a visit to their country by the French-Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, whom they called a Zionist agent.

The Islamists greeted Henri-Levy, a celebrity writer in his native France, by staging a surprise protest rally against his presence in Tunisia at Tunis’ Carthage airport on Oct. 31t, Le Parisien daily reported. They cried out: “No to Zionist power in Tunisia” and “Get lost” at Levy, who left the north African country on Monday.

His visit came in the wake of the country’s second free parliamentary election since the 2011 overthrow of its former president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in a revolution that sparked a string of revolutions across the Arab world.

The Islamist Ennahda party, which used to be the country’s largest after its victory in the first free election, suffered a stinging defeat in the Oct. 26 election to the secularist Nida Tounes, which won 85 seats in the next 217-seat chamber.

Some Tunisian media reported Levy fled the country because of the protests but he denied these reports in an interview published Monday in Le Point.

“A few dozen Islamists, perhaps exiled pro-Ghadafi activists, waited for me at the airport and inveighed against a Zionist placing his dirty feet on Tunisian soil,” he said.

While he downplayed that event, Levy added that “the issue, to the extent that there is one, is what followed in the newsrooms and social networks: Within hours, I had become at best – and I mean in reputable newspapers – a ‘Jewish intellectual’ or “ Zionist agent’ who had come single-handedly to sow disorder and dissent in the young Tunisian democracy.”

Blogs, meanwhile, described Levy as a “dog, vermin” and “vampire who had come to drink Arab blood,” he complained.

Last year, Levy, who supported France’s military intervention in Libya, was barred from visiting there because he is Jewish.