The Congressional Candidate Who Volunteered for Al-Qaeda's Logistics Network

Court records, federal affidavits, and a 30-year-old newspaper interview tell the story Adam Hamawy will not.

Let us be precise about what we are looking at. A man who road-tripped with the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, translated for him at press conferences, and defended him in federal court is now the frontrunner for a congressional seat in New Jersey. His name is Adam Hamawy. He is a plastic surgeon. He has the endorsements of Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna. And this week, thanks to an explosive investigation by Jewish Insider, we have learned that his ties to the world of jihadist terror run even deeper than anyone previously reported. The Democratic Party knows all of this. It does not care.

We already knew about the Blind Sheikh. Hamawy drove thirteen hours to a Detroit conference with Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the man who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He translated for the sheikh when Abdel-Rahman denied his role in the attack. He took the witness stand in 1995 to defend him in federal court, where the sheikh was ultimately convicted of plotting a campaign of terror attacks against New York City. These are not allegations. They are court-documented facts. And the five progressive luminaries who endorsed him knew all of it.

Now, thanks to a new investigative report by Will Bredderman of Jewish Insider, we know there is more. Jewish Insider recovered a 1996 Newark Star-Ledger interview through an archive of print publications, a document that had gone unreported for thirty years. In it, Hamawy described volunteering in Bosnia during the summer of 1994, one year before his courtroom defense of the Blind Sheikh, with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the Benevolence International Foundation.

The name sounds like a harmless charity. It was not.

The 9/11 Commission Report identified the foundation’s Sarajevo base as part of an “impressive array of offices” that covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities established by Osama bin Laden. When Bosnian and American authorities raided the group’s offices in 2002, they found weapons, correspondence between the group’s chief executive Enaam Arnaout and bin Laden, an organizational chart of Al-Qaeda, a handwritten list of top donors to the terror network, and documents concerning Al-Qaeda’s 1988 founding. The U.S. Treasury Department and the United Nations Security Council still list Benevolence International among entities sanctioned for terrorist connections. This is not a gray area. This is not a matter of interpretation. This is a federally designated Al-Qaeda front.

Hamawy says he spent five weeks delivering medical supplies to hospitals in Sarajevo and Zenica. Zenica, it happens, was the exact area where the Bosnian Army had established its “El Mujahedin” unit for foreign fighters. The European Court of Human Rights found that Benevolence International was among the organizations providing funds and assistance to that unit. The group’s leadership in 1994 included Mohamed Loay Bayazid, an alleged Al-Qaeda co-founder who sought to acquire weapons-grade uranium for the terror network. By the time Hamawy arrived, the group’s chief executive had already been arrested in Croatia on suspicions of weapons smuggling.

Are we supposed to believe this was all a coincidence? That a man already personally acquainted with the Blind Sheikh simply wandered into the operational infrastructure of Al-Qaeda by accident?

As Jewish Insider’s reporting shows, the connections run deeper still. Hamawy told the Star-Ledger he found Benevolence International through the “Bosnian mission to the United States.” Records indicate the counselor at that mission was a New Jersey native named Saffet Catovic, who later became the public spokesman for Benevolence International when federal agents first raided its offices in December 2001. Last fall, Catovic hosted Hamawy on a YouTube panel about Gaza. Members of Catovic’s family have donated to Hamawy’s congressional campaign. The circle, as they say, remains unbroken.

And yet the Democratic Party’s progressive wing has not merely tolerated this record. It has celebrated it. Sanders, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Khanna represent the ideological vanguard of the modern left, and they looked at Adam Hamawy’s biography and saw a champion. One is forced to ask what, precisely, would disqualify a candidate in their eyes. The answer, increasingly, appears to be nothing, so long as the candidate’s hostility toward Israel is sufficiently pronounced.

That is the real story here. Hamawy’s recent prominence stems largely from his volunteer work in Gaza, where he has insisted, against video evidence from the Israeli Defense Forces, that the European Hospital in Khan Younis had no Hamas tunnels beneath it. The IDF released footage of those subterranean passages. Hamas subsequently confirmed the killing of its leader Mohammed Sinwar in that very location. Hamawy’s account was false. The Democratic Party’s progressive caucus endorsed him anyway.

This is what the party has become. A man with documented ties to two separate organizations connected to Al-Qaeda, who testified on behalf of a convicted terrorist, who parrots Hamas talking points in the face of contradicting evidence, is their preferred candidate for the United States Congress. He has refused to answer repeated questions from Jewish Insider about his time with Benevolence International. His campaign has said nothing.

The voters of New Jersey deserve better. The country deserves better. And the Democratic Party, if it retains any institutional memory of what it once stood for, ought to be ashamed of itself for letting it come to this.

When a man’s biography reads like a tour of the Al-Qaeda support network, and a major American political party responds with endorsements and fundraising emails, we have crossed a threshold that demands to be named plainly. This is not a failure of vetting. It is a failure of values.