In an alleged case of grooming jihad, a Muslim man posed as an orthodox Jew to lure and marry a Jewish girl in the USA. The FBI is probing a Lebanese-born Muslim man, who posed as a Hasidic Jew and lied his way into marrying Sally, a Jewish woman of Syrian descent living in Brooklyn, New York. To hide his lie, he pretended to be a US secret agent. Eliyah Hawila, whose real identity is Ali Hassan Hawila, told his wife that he worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) when she stumbled upon his Lebanese passport and caught him lying. Sally’s parents intervened and contacted the FBI, who discovered three passports on him and initiated an investigation.
According to reports, Hawila met Sally at College Station, Texas, where he was living at the time. They started dating each other over the internet. According to The Times of Israel, Hawila and Sally eventually married in a ceremony in New York that was attended by no one from the groom’s family. Sally discovered his Lebanese passport a few weeks into their marriage and got suspicious about his past.
Upon being confronted about his Muslim identity, Hawila concocted an elaborate backstory about his non-existent Jewish roots. He even studied Hebrew so that he could recite Jewish prayers, and he joined a local Chabad community centre at Texas A & M University in College Station, where he studied the Torah (the first five books of the Jewish Bible).
According to sources, two weeks into the wedding, someone told the bride’s father that he needs to look into the groom. The bride’s father discovered Hawila’s real identity — Ali Hassan Hawila, a member of a Shiite family from southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the terror group Hezbollah.
“Her father began Googling my last name until he reaches my father, who tells him stuff about me, that: ‘No, he’s not Jewish, he’s not this, he’s not that,’” Hawila admitted during an interview with Kan TV.
When the woman’s brothers arrived at the couple’s home to know more, he discovered three passports, each with a different name and photograph of the man. Other photographs showed the man surrounded by people, most likely his relatives. The local Jews then quickly got the bride out of the house and relocated her to a safe house.
The FBI was informed and the Israeli Consulate General was also updated on the case.
The FBI is currently investigating the matter and Hawila’s claims that he worked for the NSA, since he reportedly also submitted a ‘fake letter’ purporting to be from NSA coworkers to confirm his employment with the US spy agency. The US Department of Homeland Security along with the Israeli consulate in New York is also looking into whether Hwalia entered the country illegally. However, no suggestion of him being involved in any kind of terror-related activities has come to the fore so far.
According to the Times of Israel, Hawila has claimed that he has always felt a strong affinity for the Jewish culture. So much so that he began referring to himself as Jewish, which was not approved by the people of his country. When Hawila and his parents relocated to the United States, he also looked for synagogues in the area in the hopes of converting. “When I got rejected I started just saying I’m Jewish,” he said.
