Prominent progressives backed Adam Hamawy despite a documented past that includes time with a charity later tied to Al-Qaida and public support for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh.

Adam Hamawy is a plastic surgeon in West Windsor, New Jersey, and the frontrunner in the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. The primary is June 2, and Hamawy highlights his charitable work and professional life as qualifications for Congress.

He has not advertised other parts of his record. Jewish Insider recently recovered a 1996 interview showing Hamawy spent five weeks in Bosnia in the summer of 1994 working with a charity called the Benevolence International Foundation.

The Benevolence International Foundation was later shut down and named as a front for Al-Qaida by government bodies. “A front is a fake charity. It collects money for what looks like humanitarian work and moves it to terrorists instead,” a description that matches how that organization was characterized after investigations.

The group’s founder was a Saudi financier later sanctioned for funding Al-Qaida, and its chief executive pleaded guilty to racketeering in 2003 before a court stripped him of citizenship in 2019. Reporting also shows at least one leader tried to acquire materiel that could have been used for a nuclear weapon.

Hamawy worked in Sarajevo and Zenica during that Bosnia trip, and official inquiries have tied the charity’s Bosnian base to bin Laden’s network. The 9/11 Commission said the charity’s presence in the Bosnian capital was part of the network set up to “covertly provide financial and other support for terrorist activities,” and a European court later linked Benevolence to units of foreign fighters.

A Bosnia historian quoted in that reporting allowed that not every volunteer was, in his words, “a hardcore jihadist with terrorist intent.” Even if you accept that caveat, Hamawy’s subsequent actions complicate the “youthful travel” explanation.

One year after Bosnia, Hamawy took the witness stand for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of planning a wider campaign of attacks on New York landmarks, and he preached that Muslims had a duty to attack Americans and Jews of any nationality.

Hamawy translated for the sheikh at a Jersey City press conference two months after the 1993 bombing and later testified on his behalf at the 1995 trial. His defense now is summed up in his own words: “A blind man has a piece of paper and says, ‘What does it say on there?’” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, even as he acknowledged hearing the sheikh preach violence and remaining at his side.

One foreign trip can be written off as youthful curiosity; standing with a convicted mastermind soon after an attack is a conscious choice. Hamawy made that choice and then continued to show the same pattern in later years.

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 beneath that hospital’s emergency room and recovered the body of Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar there.

Across three decades and three continents, Hamawy keeps appearing on the same side of these fraught issues. That pattern is not hypothetical; it is a string of public acts and statements that voters should be able to evaluate for themselves.

And yet five of the most visible progressives in America lined up behind him. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna endorsed Hamawy after many of these ties were already public, not before those facts surfaced.

That is telling. The Blind Sheikh connections were covered by major outlets long before the recent reporting connected the Bosnia stint, and the endorsements came despite that public record. To call it an oversight ignores the timeline and the choice.

What the endorsements reveal fits a broader pattern on the left. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss called a Maine candidate’s Nazi tattoo “personally disqualifying,” a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez pushed back and called for a primary challenge. At the same time, activists have targeted Democrats who defended Israel, and those who raise alarms about antisemitism are increasingly the ones under pressure.

The same currents show up elsewhere: a Maine monitor matched a candidate’s tattoo to SS insignia, Ilhan Omar said Washington’s support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” and the House voted to condemn those remarks as antisemitic. Students at Columbia chanted “globalize the intifada” while Jewish classmates felt unsafe, and prosecutors recently charged a Kata’ib Hezbollah commander in an alleged plot against a synagogue.

It’s a coherent set of actions and words, and the label that fits is antisemitism. A sizable bloc of the left now appears willing to tolerate, even reward, those who traffic in or excuse that mindset.

The people who backed Hamawy knew who he was and made their choice anyway. That decision signals what they value and what they consider acceptable for their candidates, and it should matter to voters who do not share those priorities.