Trump Admin Boots Lebanon’s Detroit Consul for Calling the Killing of 241 Marines ‘Heroic’

The Trump administration has kicked out Lebanon’s top diplomat in Detroit for praising the suicide bombing that killed 241 Americans in Beirut.

The State Department declared Consul General Ibrahim Charara persona non grata — diplomatic language for get out — and ordered him to leave the United States. Sources at Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry told Asharq Al-Awsat the embassy in Washington was officially notified and that Charara was given 48 hours. A source close to him told L’Orient Today he received the notice Friday afternoon and has until Sunday at 8 a.m. The Washington Free Beacon, which first unearthed his posts, reported he is expected to leave by Sunday.

The State Department has not issued a public statement. It does not need one for the order to take effect.

What he wrote

Chuck Ross of the Free Beacon first published the posts on Nov. 2. They were still online this weekend.

On Oct. 20, 2021, Charara wrote, “From the Marines barracks in Beirut to the Al-Tanf base… we will reject the occupier and defeat him.” The line tied the barracks bombing to a claimed Iran- and Hezbollah-linked drone attack that year on American soldiers at the Al-Tanf garrison in Syria.

Three days later, on the anniversary of the attack, he wrote, “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.”

The Free Beacon also reported that the banner on his X account is a burning Israeli flag, and that the account has sat unused since November 2021. L’Orient Today checked and found the same thing: no posts after 2021, and a bio that still listed his earlier job at Lebanon’s embassy in Egypt.

The bombing he called heroic

On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport. Two hundred forty-one American service members were killed — 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers, the Marine Corps has said. A near-simultaneous attack killed 58 French paratroopers. It remains the deadliest day for the Corps since Iwo Jima.

The Marines were in Lebanon with a multinational peacekeeping force, sent after the Lebanese government asked for help. A group calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed the bombing. The United States has long attributed it to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization.

That is the “single strike” Charara called heroic resistance.

The hacked-account claim

A source close to Charara told Lebanese broadcaster LBCI, and later L’Orient Today, that the posts came from an old account that was hacked several years ago and that the consul did not write them. The L’Orient source said the account was hacked seven years ago — which would be 2019 — and that Charara no longer had the login, the email or the phone number tied to it.

The posts the Free Beacon quoted are dated October 2021, roughly two years after a hack in 2019 would have happened. The source also said Charara had already passed U.S. security checks when he was accredited in April 2025, and that Friday’s notice arrived without any earlier complaint about how he did his job.

Those are his camp’s words. The posts went out under his name. Washington treated them as his.

Dearborn

The Detroit posting put him in the middle of one of the largest Lebanese communities in America, centered on Dearborn. The Free Beacon documented him moving through that circuit.

In late October he attended the Arab American Political Action Committee’s annual banquet, where he was photographed seated near then-Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s open Senate seat on Nov. 3. The same report placed him at an Arab-American Civil Rights League gala last month with Cenk Uygur, and at a June ribbon-cutting for the Islamic Institute of America alongside El-Sayed.

A source close to Charara told L’Orient Today he went to those events in his diplomatic capacity and was not campaigning, and suggested the controversy was being used to target El-Sayed. Another source close to him told the Jerusalem Post the two men just happened to sit next to each other and have no personal or political ties.

A seating chart is not why he is being sent home. The posts are.

What happens next

Persona non grata means the host country has withdrawn a diplomat’s welcome. Charara has until Sunday morning to leave. If he is gone by then, his posting is over.

At the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last month, on the 43rd anniversary, a Marine laid a wreath against a wall of names. The inscription beside those names reads, “They Came in Peace.” Charara’s circle wants Americans to believe a hacked account called their deaths heroic resistance. The administration decided it would not keep a consul who wrote that, or whose name was on it.