New Jersey Dem Congressional Candidate Testified on Behalf of Terror Mastermind ‘Blind Sheikh’

A New Jersey plastic surgeon who is the leading fundraiser in the crowded Democratic congressional primary was an associate of terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—the "Blind Sheikh"—and served as a defense witness at the trial that ultimately saw the cleric put away for life, court records show.

Adam Hamawy, running in the Democratic primary to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District with Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D., Minn.) endorsement, was a 26-year-old medical student when Abdel-Rahman's lawyers put him on the stand to deny charges that the Blind Sheikh—whose followers carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—had called for the murder of then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The New York Times reported on Hamawy's participation in the trial at the time, but dozens of pages of testimony reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon reveal a yearslong relationship between the congressional candidate and the jihadist leader. Front Page Magazine first reported on their connection.

Hamawy and Abdel-Rahman met in 1991 when the Islamist firebrand delivered a lecture at Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School in Cliffwood, N.J. From there, the Egyptian-born Hamawy said, he followed the Blind Sheikh to speaking events at mosques, visited the cleric in his home, and provided him with translation help.

During his testimony, which Hamawy began with a traditional "salam alaykum" greeting to the Blind Sheikh, he described taking a 13-hour car journey with Abdel-Rahman and some of his associates to a conference in Detroit called "Towards a Global Islamic Economy." Those associates were Sheikh Abdel Khalid "from the Salam Mosque" in Jersey City, referred to in the court records as a "jihad office." That mosque, where Abdel-Rahman preached, was the location where the conspirators behind the World Trade Center bombing would meet.

Also in the car was Emad Salem, an FBI informant and central prosecution witness who would help put the Blind Sheikh behind bars. According to court documents, Abdel-Rahman told Salem he should turn his "rifle's barrel to President Mubarak's chest, and kill him." Hamawy, who told prosecutors he shared a hotel room with Abdel-Rahman at the conference, denied that he had heard the Blind Sheikh say anything to that effect.

But he did admit that the conference, where Abdel-Rahman appeared as a featured speaker, was not about economics.

When prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked Hamawy whether Abdel-Rahman talked "about conquering the land of the infidels" during the event, Hamawy said, "He might have, yes," adding that "it wasn't a commerce thing."

Hamawy told Fitzgerald that he heard the word "jihad" more than once that weekend.

Several other speakers at the conference were well-known figures in the world of Islamist terrorism. After Abdel-Rahman spoke, attendees heard from Dr. Ahmad Nofal, a Holocaust denier who has falsely accused Israelis of harvesting the organs of Palestinians. A 1995 PBS documentary called Jihad in America describes Nofal as "a known recruiter of Hamas terrorists."

Footage in the documentary shows Nofal boasting about a 1989 terrorist attack on a bus in Tel Aviv that killed 16, including one U.S. citizen and two Canadians. Hamawy told prosecutors he had heard Nofal speak on further occasions after the Detroit conference.

The documentary also includes footage from the conference Hamawy attended. One speaker, Osama Bin Laden associate Hassan al-Turabi, spoke via video. Al-Turabi, the alleged architect of the 1989 coup in Sudan, told the Associated Press in 1997 that "America incarnates the devil for Muslims," adding, "When I say Muslims, I mean all the Muslims in the world."

In his testimony, Hamawy told Fitzgerald that he had heard Abdel-Rahman speak about how the United States and Israel are "the enem[ies] of Islam." When Fitzgerald asked whether Hamawy heard "about how Muslims had to do jihad against the enemies of Islam," Hamawy responded, "Of course. That's what [Abdel-Rahman] always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know?"

Hamawy is 1 of 13 candidates in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D.) in the deep-blue district. He has a significant fundraising lead over his opponents, totaling more than $540,000 in donations to his closest competitor's $400,000. In addition to Omar, Hamawy has received the backing of anti-Israel organizations like American Priorities—a new super PAC funded in large part by donors to Mayor Zohran Mamdani's (D., N.Y.) mayoral campaign—and Track AIPAC, which accuses pro-Israel politicians in the United States of being "foreign agents."

The political arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations—whose leader, Nihad Awad, said he was "happy to see" Oct. 7—endorsed Hamawy in March.

According to the New Jersey-based American Muslims for Democracy advocacy group, there are more than 320,000 Muslims in New Jersey who make up about 3.5 percent of the state's population, putting it in third place nationally after New York and Illinois. The 12th District does not include the city with the largest Muslim population, Paterson, but does include the population hub of Middlesex County.

Abdel-Rahman was ultimately convicted of seditious conspiracy, solicitation to murder Mubarak, conspiracy to murder Mubarak, solicitation to attack a U.S. military installation, and conspiracy to conduct bombings. That bombing plot included six targets: The United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, the St. Regis and U.N. Plaza Hotels, and the FBI's main New York office. Conspirators also spoke of their desire to assassinate then-Sen. Al D'Amato (R., N.Y.) and attack Manhattan's Diamond District.

Prosecutors accused Abdel-Rahman of leading a conspiracy to "levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States." His acolytes, in addition to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, carried out the assassination of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane in 1990 and the 1997 Luxor massacre in Egypt that killed 62 people, most of them tourists.

Andrew McCarthy, who served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and led the Blind Sheikh's prosecution, told the Free Beacon that Hamawy's testimony was similar to that of other defense witnesses.

"As was uniformly the case with witnesses presented in the extensive defense case, his testimony—once cross-examination was over—did more to bolster the prosecution’s proof of a jihadist terrorism conspiracy against the United States than to help the accused," said McCarthy, who now writes for National Review. "The jury obviously credited Emad Salem’s account of the trip to Detroit. And the evidence that Sheikh Abdel Rahman called for the killing of Mubarak was so overwhelming—based on far more than Salem’s testimony—that his lawyers were reduced to arguing, in essence, that Mubarak had it coming. Not surprisingly, that’s not how the jury saw it."

Hamawy did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Jersey congressional candidate's relationship with the Blind Sheikh is not his only connection to terrorism. The Free Beacon reported last week that Hamawy spent weeks in Gaza working at a hospital that functioned as a Hamas command center and dismissed reports that the terror group had tunnels under the building. Mohammed Sinwar, a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, was killed in a tunnel underneath the hospital's emergency room.

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