Blind Sheikh Sympathizer Runs for a New Jersey Seat in Congress

R eports emerged last week that a plastic surgeon who testified in behalf of the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman) in the terrorism prosecution I led in the early-to-mid Nineties is running for Congress, to represent New Jersey. Dr. Adam Hamawy is reportedly the leading fundraiser in the Democratic primary, basking in the endorsement of Representative Ilhan Omar, the party’s Islamist firebrand in Minnesota.

I remember Hamawy only dimly. The trial happened more than 30 years ago, there were hundreds of witnesses over ten months (including a defense case that lasted over two months), and I did not cross-examine him — those honors were done by one of my partners, Pat Fitzgerald. But I was alerted to the story a few days ago by the Washington Free Beacon, and the reporting about his testimony jogged my memory a bit — to the point that I was able to give the Beacon a statement.

Abdel Rahman, who lost his sight as a child in Egypt, was already a globally renowned sharia scholar (often called “the emir of jihad”) by the time he relocated to the United States in the early Nineties. Inexplicably, U.S. immigration authorities issued him a green card (as a religious worker) despite his having been charged with issuing the fatwa (sharia edict) approving the 1981 terrorist murder of President Anwar Sadat after Sadat made peace with Israel.

In Egypt, a fundamentalist Muslim country where the Muslim Brotherhood was founded and thrived, the Blind Sheikh managed to beat the murder rap, despite bragging that he had in fact issued the fatwa. He argued that his duty as a mufti was to issue opinions on Islamic law (such as whether it is necessary and proper to eliminate a ruler who, from the fundamentalist perspective, betrays sharia). He later turned his defense into a book, A Word of Truth. Ultimately, the Blind Sheikh’s reasoning and charisma did not resonate with American jurors applying American law. At our trial, he was found guilty of seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States and solicitation to murder Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak. He perished in federal prison in 2017, having been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996. In the interim, Osama bin Laden credited him with having issued — while incarcerated — the fatwa approving the 9/11 attacks.

At the trial, our main informant witness, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad Salem, testified about many interactions with the Blind Sheikh. These included a 1991 trip from New Jersey to Detroit for a conference called “Towards a Global Islamic Economy” during which, Salem recounted, Abdel Rahman asked him why he hadn’t turned his gun on Mubarak. In an attempt to refute this, the Blind Sheikh’s lawyers called Dr. Hamawy as a witness, and he dutifully testified that he was on the trip and didn’t recall any such conversation. Yet, on cross-examination, the defense decision to call him backfired: Hamawy acknowledged that the Sheikh spoke at the conference about the obligation of jihad against “the enemies of Islam” such as the United States and Israel, and about “conquering the land of the infidels.” As the Beacon reported, he conceded, “Of course. That’s what [Abdel Rahman] always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know?”

As a strategic matter, it puzzled me that Lynn Stewart, the Sheikh’s main defense lawyer (who also died in 2017), called Hamawy. The proof that the Sheikh rabidly argued for Mubarak’s murder was daunting, including in his recorded statements. To repeat what I told the Beacon:

As was uniformly the case with witnesses presented in the extensive defense case, [Hamawy’s] 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. 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.

I took over the investigation shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, while the Sheikh’s underlings were actively plotting a second operation against New York City landmarks, thankfully thwarted because of Salem’s infiltration. I’ve often observed in the decades since the trial — including in a memoir, Willful Blindness (2008) — that, at the time, I had no more knowledge of Islam than most reasonably well-educated Americans did. I was inclined to believe what we were saying as a government: The actions of the terrorists we’d arrested could not be rationally tied to any authentic interpretation of Islam.

That turned out to be wrong, although the government still clings to hope despite experience. There are diverse interpretations of Islam, but sharia supremacism is the dominant Islam of the Muslim Middle East and of Islamist organization with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. That is precisely because there is scholarship going back 14 centuries supporting it. The Blind Sheikh was not merely the maniac that our government depicted, unrepresentative of any religious ideology; he was a scholar whose authority to command jihadist violence owed to his mastery of sharia-supremacist doctrine. His physical maladies left him unable to participate hands-on in terrorist activity, but his prestige as a doctrinal authority nevertheless enabled him to be a terrorist leader.

I learned that the hard way. To do my job, I had to scrutinize all of the Sheikh’s writings and speeches. It turned out that when he claimed Islamic scripture said something, the scripture bore him out. You could perhaps argue that his construction was incomplete or that it failed to confine the scriptures’ commands to violence to the context of their ancient time and place. But you couldn’t credibly say he was inaccurately citing the Koran and the hadiths.

That was one of the two things that knocked me for a loop. The other was the witnesses called in the defense case.

In the main, they seemed like perfectly normal, peaceful people who would no more carry out a mass-murder attack than I would. But the common thread was that they were all willing to defer to the Blind Sheikh — who unabashedly called for forcible conquest of the United States — when it came to core tenets of their belief system. The fact that the force of his scholarly prestige and influence could induce them to come to court and testify in his behalf, the fact that they’d say he was a reliable authority on the meaning of tenets central to their belief system (Islamic concepts such as jihad and sharia), was as frightening as it was astonishing.

I wrote another book in 2010 about the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration of the West, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. I took the terms “grand jihad” and “sabotage” from an internal strategic memorandum that explained how the Brotherhood regarded its mission to spread sharia. Though violence was part of the menu, it was mostly a sophisticated, multifaceted plan to exploit the freedoms of the American political system, the media, the academy, and the courts. I pointed out that the Islamists had found an ally in the political left, particularly the Democratic Party in the United States. To be sure, they disagreed on a number of points (e.g., abortion, sexual conduct, the rights of women); they were in sync, nonetheless, in believing that America was responsible for most of the world’s woes and that it needed radical remaking.

Notwithstanding its factual support, this viewpoint was deeply unpopular when The Grand Jihad was published 16 years ago. Today it is undeniable — if anything is clear after Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the widespread support for its terrorist “resistance” to Israel, it is that. Indeed, the Beacon reports 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.”

There are probably more than 4 million Muslims in the United States — a small number out of a total population of 340 million. Nevertheless, the Muslim population is concentrated in a few places, and the segments that are influenced by the Brotherhood and its network of Islamist organizations are a political force in states, cities, and districts where they tend to vote as a bloc. The Muslim presence in New Jersey is the highest, as a percentage of the overall population, of any state in the union — about 320,000 out of roughly 9.5 million.

Does a sympathizer of an infamous anti-American terrorist, one who went to the trouble of testifying in his behalf, have a realistic shot at being elected to Congress? In blue New Jersey in 2026? If you dismiss the possibility of Representative Adam Hamawy (D., N.J.), you haven’t been paying attention.