Bernie Sanders endorsed him. So did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna. Five of the most powerful progressives in the country lined up behind Adam Hamawy, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for a New Jersey seat in Congress.

This is the real man they endorsed.

He worked for an Al-Qaida front. He stood up for the cleric behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The five biggest names on the American left backed him because of what he is, not in spite of it. For this wing of the party, a man like this is the draw, not the problem. That should stop the country cold.

Who Adam Hamawy is

Hamawy is a plastic surgeon in West Windsor, New Jersey, and the frontrunner to replace retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. The primary is June 2. He claims to have done many good things in his past.

He does not advertise the rest. Jewish Insider reported last week that Hamawy spent five weeks in Bosnia in the summer of 1994 working with a charity called the Benevolence International Foundation. He described the trip himself, in a 1996 newspaper interview the outlet recovered from a print archive. It sat unexamined for thirty years.

What Benevolence International was

Let’s start with the charity, because most people have never heard of it.

The Benevolence International Foundation was a Chicago-based group that the Treasury Department and the United Nations later shut down and named as a front for Al-Qaida. A front is a fake charity. It collects money for what looks like humanitarian work and moves it to terrorists instead.

Its founder was a Saudi financier the United States later sanctioned for funding Al-Qaida. Its chief executive pleaded guilty to racketeering in 2003, admitting he had funneled donations to fighters overseas, and a federal court stripped him of his citizenship in 2019. One of its leaders had tried to buy the material for a nuclear weapon.

Hamawy worked in two cities, Sarajevo and Zenica. The 9/11 Commission found that the charity’s base in the Bosnian capital was part of the network bin Laden built to “covertly provide financial and other support for terrorist activities.” Zenica is where the Bosnian army ran a unit of foreign fighters, and a European human-rights court later found that Benevolence International helped fund it.

A Bosnia historian quoted in the reporting offered the obvious caveat: not every volunteer who passed through the charity was, in his words, “a hardcore jihadist with terrorist intent.” Fine. Even the most generous reading of those five weeks does not survive what Hamawy did next.

And then there’s the Blind Sheikh

One year after Bosnia, Hamawy took the witness stand for Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Abdel-Rahman was a blind Egyptian cleric known as the Blind Sheikh. He was the mastermind of the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center, and he was convicted in 1995 of planning a wider campaign of attacks on New York landmarks. He preached that Muslims had a duty to attack Americans and Jews of any nationality.

Hamawy followed him. Two months after the 1993 bombing killed six people, he stood beside the sheikh at a press conference in Jersey City and translated his denial. He rode thirteen hours in a van to sit with him at a conference in Detroit. He testified on the sheikh’s behalf at the 1995 trial.

His explanation now is that he was only the help. “A blind man has a piece of paper and says, ‘What does it say on there?’” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Just the translation.” But he conceded in the same interview that he heard the sheikh preach violence, and he stayed anyway.

One trip to Bosnia could be youth. Standing with the Blind Sheikh a year later, after the towers had already been bombed, is a choice. Hamawy made it.

The hospital he said had no tunnel

The pattern did not end in the 1990s. After visiting Gaza, Hamawy wrote in Jacobin that the European Hospital in Khan Younis was “a completely benign civilian hospital with no tunnels underneath it.”

The next year, the Israeli military found a tunnel compound directly beneath that hospital’s emergency room and recovered the body of the Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar inside it.

Across three decades and three continents, Adam Hamawy keeps turning up on the same side.

They knew. That was the point.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Khanna did not back Hamawy before any of this surfaced. They backed him after. The Blind Sheikh ties had already been covered by the Wall Street Journal, by Politico, and by the Inquirer. The information was public, and the party’s biggest names moved toward him, not away.

So spare the talk of an oversight. They knew who he was. They chose him anyway.

It took a Jewish outlet to pull the thirty-year-old Bosnia trail into the daylight. The rest of the press let it sit. Hamawy, for his part, did not answer the questions Jewish Insider put to him about the charity.

Mask off

Hamawy is what a large part of the modern left now rewards, and the proof is in who it punishes.

When Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Jewish Democrat from Massachusetts, called the Nazi tattoo on Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner “personally disqualifying,” a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez called for Auchincloss to be primaried for saying so. The same activist left has moved to primary John Fetterman over his support for Israel. The Democrats getting attacked are the ones who object to antisemitism. When the people raising the alarm are the ones who get punished, the alarm is no longer the minority position. It is the dissent being purged.

The rest of the field tells the same story. Platner kept a tattoo that the Maine Monitor matched to the insignia of the SS units that guarded the Nazi death camps. Ilhan Omar said Washington’s support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” and the House voted to condemn the comments as antisemitic. The encampment at Columbia chanted to “globalize the intifada” while Jewish students were told to stay home. Prosecutors in New York charged a Kata’ib Hezbollah commander this month with a plot to attack a synagogue in the city.

All of it is the same belief set, and the people who hold it have stopped hiding it. The word for it is antisemitism, and a large bloc of the left has decided it can win with it.

Vote it down

The endorsers knew exactly who Hamawy is. They chose him for what he tells their base, not in spite of what he tells the country.

A party that wanted the country’s trust would treat a man like this as disqualifying. A growing part of this one treats him as a frontrunner.

The remedy is the ballot. New Jersey can end this in the primary on June 2. If it survives, the country ends it in November. Not because Hamawy is a Democrat. Because a man who worked for an Al-Qaida front and stood with the Blind Sheikh has no business anywhere near Congress, and the people who endorsed him just told you what they are. Vote him and all those with these beliefs out of office.