Hezbollah Mouthpiece in Lebanon Lashes Out at Free Beacon Over Report That Led to US Expelling Diplomat Who Celebrated Deadly Marine Barracks Bombing

Ibrahim Charara was sent packing on Sunday over social media comments that glorified Hezbollah and denigrated American troops

A Lebanese newspaper closely aligned with the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is lashing out at the Washington Free Beacon over reports that led to the removal of the Lebanese diplomat Ibrahim Charara from the United States over his praise for Hezbollah’s 1983 suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American service members.

Al-Akhbar, a Hezbollah mouthpiece founded in 2006, published a lengthy defense of Charara, who until last week served as consul general to Detroit, on page 2 of its print edition, portraying his expulsion as the result of a politically motivated smear campaign.

“An article published by journalist Chuck Ross in the Washington Free Beacon (a publication with a long history of attacking Arab and Muslim Americans) on the morning of the US elections stands out,” reads the Al-Akhbar article, entitled “Are Trump supporters taking revenge on Lebanese people in Michigan?”

The article refers to a Free Beacon story on November 2 exposing Charara’s social media posts, in which he celebrated the 1983 Hezbollah attack, which killed 58 French military personnel and 5 civilians in addition to 241 U.S. servicemen. It was the deadliest terrorist attack against Americans until 9/11 and the second-deadliest day for the Marines after Iwo Jima.

“On this day, the heroic resistance to the American military occupation of Beirut ended with a single strike that documents the defeat of neocolonialism on our land,” Charara wrote on Oct. 23, 2021. Charara’s banner image on Twitter is of a burning Israeli flag.

The State Department declared Charara persona non grata in response to the story last week, a severe diplomatic punishment in which host nations can declare foreign diplomats to be unwelcome. Charara was ordered to leave the United States by Sunday.

Al-Akhbar claims, without evidence, that Charara “was a victim of the resounding defeat suffered by Trump’s team” and that he was punished due to his “political views” and his “insistence on cultivating good relations in Michigan with Lebanese figures” who have criticized the Trump administration.

The Free Beacon has reported before on Al-Akhbar‘s Hezbollah ties. In 2020, the paper published a list of American military bases in the Middle East as “possible targets” for Iranian strikes in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the Free Beacon reported.

Charara did cultivate close ties to political leaders in Michigan during his brief diplomatic stint.

Charara held an important role as Lebanon’s top representative to the Detroit area, which has the largest Arab population in the United States, including “Little Beirut” in Dearborn. Photos show Charara rubbing shoulders with various community and religious leaders and activists in Dearborn. He has been seen with Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D.). Last month, he attended the gala for the Arab American Civil Rights League, where he was photographed with keynote speaker Cenk Uygur.

And Charara has attended multiple events with senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D., Mich.).

El-Sayed and Charara are seen in photos at the June 6 ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Islamic Institute of America, a radical mosque led by Imam Hassan Qazwini. The cleric has called late Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah a “hero” and prayed that God “grant victory to our brothers in Iran” over the United States. Dearborn Heights mayor Mo Baydoun, who recently visited the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese leader Nabih Berri, is also seen in the photograph of the mosque’s christening.

El-Sayed and Charara were also seated together at the Arab American Political Action Committee’s annual banquet earlier this month. During his speech, El-Sayed praised PAC founder Osama Siblani for his “leadership” and said that Siblani stood “on the shoulders of giants.”

Siblani, the publisher of the Arab American News, is an unapologetic defender of Hezbollah. He repeatedly refers to the terrorist group as “freedom fighters.” And he has said that one of his greatest achievements was praising Nasrallah as a “hero” at a public rally in Dearborn days before Israel assassinated the Hezbollah leader.

Siblani accompanied Charara to the Detroit airport before his flight back to Beirut on Sunday and smeared the Free Beacon as “liars” in an interview with Lebanese television about the Charara scandal. Siblani, who has claimed that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “worse than the Holocaust,” repeatedly refused to condemn Hezbollah’s 1983 Marine barracks bombing.

“What were the American Marines doing in Lebanon? Were they there as tourists?” he said during an exchange with Hadi Mourad, a Lebanese political activist and the publisher of the Al-Haqiqa newspaper.

The Marines were in Beirut from 1982 to 1984 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force during Lebanon’s bloody civil war. Then-president Ronald Reagan pulled the United States out of Lebanon a few months after the barracks bombing, and Lebanon has remained in various phases of civil war, occupation, and economic collapse ever since.

Mourad expressed concerns about Siblani’s refusal to condemn the terrorist attacks.

“To be precise, he never explicitly endorsed the bombing, but he also refused to clearly condemn it despite being given multiple opportunities to do so,” Mourad told the Free Beacon. “This information should be sent to the State Department because it represents a threat to American national security.”