A leading Democrat congressional candidate in New Jersey not only testified on behalf of a convicted terrorist, but he also worked with an organization later shuttered for being an Al-Qaida front.
Jewish Insider broke the story on how plastic surgeon and candidate Adam Hamawy traveled to Bosnia in 1994 with the “Benevolence International Foundation.” The telling piece of evidence is a recently recovered interview Hamawy did with The Newark-Star Ledger in May 1996. At that time, Hamawy proudly described his time with the group in Sarajevo and Zenica. In 2002, Bosnian authorities raided Benevolence International Foundation’s offices in those cities after they and the U.S. identified the group as an Al-Qaida front. Osama bin Laden had a hand in helping establish the offices to provide financial support to his activities, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
I recently wrote about Hamawy’s testimony on behalf of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy got into the witness stand to deny that he had heard Abdel-Rahman — his mentor at the time — threaten to assassinate the Egyptian president, as an FBI source testified. Hamawy did admit that the conference, which included the road trip with the above threat, was not about economics, and that the shiekh had mentioned “jihad” and “conquering the land of the infidels.” Besides Abdel-Rahman, who had Hamawy over to his house after the younger man displayed enthusiasm for his talks, the conference speakers included Dr. Ahmad Nofal, a Hamas recruiter and Holocaust denier, and Osama Bin Laden associate Hassan al-Turabi. Hamawy later served as the Blind Sheik’s translator at a press conference where the latter denied his role in the WTC bombing.
It seems all of the murderous malignancies he hero-worshipped filled Hamawy with such enthusiasm for the cause of Jihad that he actually worked for a terrorist front group. Speaking of the Benevolence International Foundation, Hamawy told The Star-Ledger, “I worked in Sarajevo for 10 days and then the rest in Zenica, a large regional center in central Bosnia.”
He added, “We went out to hospitals around the area and in the mountains to check what supplies they needed and we tried to deliver them.” At the time, he was a new graduate from medical school. How contradictory that he went to school for so many years to learn how to improve lives, and yet spent years working with people whose only goal was to end lives.
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The 2002 raid at Benevolence International Foundation’s offices found weapons, a photo with and correspondence between the group’s chief and Osama bin Laden, and letters from other Al-Qaida leaders regarding terror conflicts and financial transactions. Bosnian authorities also found a list of donors to Al-Qaida, copies of documents about Al-Qaida’s founding and admission policies, information on terrorist training camps and operations, and an organizational chart of the terror group. From Jewish Insider:
The federal evidence file in the case against Benevolence International and Arnaout described how the terror organization deployed a representative to the Balkans in late 1992 on a fact-finding mission for bin Laden, part of a plan “to establish a base for operations in Europe against al Qaeda’s true enemy, the United States.” The materials assert that senior Al-Qaida officials credited Benevolence International with obtaining funds and weapons for the jihadist group, as well as with helping Al-Qaida secure arms for Bosnian militants.
By the time Hamawy arrived, the Syrian-born Arnaout had already been arrested in Croatia on suspicions of weapons smuggling, according to a 2002 handbook from the Austrian National Defence Academy — and then “apparently managed to escape from prison” and continued “forming and supervising the Training Centres” near Zenica (An attorney for Arnaout called this account of his client’s activities “unsupported,” and asserted he lacked the “practical military experience” to carry them out.) …The group, [FBI agent Robert] Walker attested, operated in tandem with the terror group across multiple nations, providing it with “logistical support.”
In my opinion, we have more than enough evidence not only for authorities to block Hamawy from running for office, but to deport him until and unless we know that he no longer admires genocidal terrorists.
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