The Dem nominee for a House seat in New Jersey was a sympathizer of the Blind Sheikh, who inspired the first World Trade Center bombing.
The Dem nominee for a House seat in New Jersey was a sympathizer of the Blind Sheikh, who inspired the first World Trade Center bombing.
A dam Hamawy, the plastic surgeon who testified as a witness for Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheikh) at the terrorism trial I prosecuted in 1995, has won the Democratic primary to seek a New Jersey seat in the House of Representatives.
I’m not surprised, alas, for the reasons I explained last month here.
To recap, the Blind Sheikh was already a notorious figure in global jihadist circles when he was permitted to relocate to the United States in 1990 — astonishingly, federal immigration authorities first admitted him on a tourist visa, then issued him a green card, rationalizing that he was a religious worker. He had publicly taken credit for issuing the fatwa (i.e., the sharia law edict) greenlighting the 1981 murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
He was in a position to give such directives — and to lead, recruit, and raise funds for terror networks — because he was a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for more than a millennium. He figured prominently, along with Osama bin Laden and others, in the formation of al-Qaeda during the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union (1979–89). It was after the Soviets withdrew that bin Laden decided to take the jihad global, targeting the United States.
Hamawy was a friend and aide to the Blind Sheikh, which is why he voluntarily appeared as a witness for him. The main subject of his testimony was a trip to Detroit in 1991. A government informant had testified that during the trip, when the informant was discussing his time in the Egyptian army, the Blind Sheikh asked him why he hadn’t turned his gun on Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor. Hamawy claimed, not very convincingly, that he hadn’t heard any such conversation.
The evidence that Abdel Rahman conspired to murder Mubarak and repeatedly called for his assassination was overwhelming, and the jury convicted him of conspiracy and incitement in connection with Mubarak, as well as seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States (among other terrorism-related charges). Hamawy conceded on cross-examination that, although the economics was the ostensible subject of the 1991 Detroit conference, Abdel Rahman used the occasion to urge violent jihad against the United States and Israel. (“Of course. That’s what he always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know?”)
Which is to say, Hamawy knew exactly with whom he was associating. It could not be otherwise since the Blind Sheikh made no secret of it.
Here’s just one of his dozens of similar assertions that I read to the jury during our trial, a recorded response (in Arabic, translated into English) on an occasion when he was asked about being labeled a “terrorist”:
What kind of name is this? Why are we afraid of it? Why do we fear the word terrorist? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We . . . have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The Koran says “to strike terror.” Therefore, we don’t fear to be described with “terrorism.” . . . They may say, “He is a terrorist, he uses violence, he uses force.” Let them say that. We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.
As I’ve previously recounted, Mohammed Abdel Rahman, one of the Blind Sheikh’s sons, became a member of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. At a September 21, 2000, event, Mohammed Abdel Rahman appeared with bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, at an Al Jazeera televised event called the “Convention to Support the Honorable Omar Abdel Rahman,” who was then in a U.S. penitentiary serving the life sentence meted out after our trial. The al-Qaeda leaders warned that jihadist attacks against America would be stepped up unless Abdel Rahman was released (just three weeks later, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 American naval personnel). Mohammed Abdel Rahman exhorted the crowd to “avenge your sheikh” and “go to the spilling of blood.”
After the 9/11 suicide hijackings, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed, bin Laden credited the Blind Sheikh with having issued the fatwa that approved the operation. Abdel Rahman had, in fact, issued an edict from his confinement:
Muslims everywhere to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.
This statement had been smuggled out of prison. It and others like it were widely disseminated by bin Laden, beginning around 1998. Abdel Rahman died in prison in 2017 — six years after bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan.
Since I wrote about Hamawy last month, there have been additional revelations. For example, Hamawy reportedly worked in Bosnia in 1994 at the Benevolence International Foundation. BIF was later designated by the U.S. government as a front organization for al-Qaeda — as usual, under the guise of charitable and humanitarian efforts. Its assets were frozen by the Treasury Department.
BIF was centrally based in Illinois, but the 9/11 Commission’s Terrorism Financing Staff Monograph found that its Bosnian centers had been part of an “impressive array of offices that covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities” that bin Laden orchestrated.
The Commission staff added:
BIF, a nonprofit organization with offices in at least 10 countries, raised millions of dollars in the United States, much of which it distributed throughout the world for purposes of humanitarian aid. As in the case of [the Global Relief Foundation, Inc. another Illinois-based charity that operated in 25 countries and “devoted a significant percentage of the funds it raised to support Islamic extremist causes”], the U.S. government believed BIF had substantial connections to terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, and was sending a sizable percentage of its funds to support the international jihadist movement.
I can add some relevant details.
Bosnian Muslims were at war with Serbians from 1992 through 1995, and with also with Croats beginning in 1994. In the enclaves in which sharia-supremacist Muslims habitually settle in the United States, Canada, and Europe, few enjoy more prestige than those who have participated in jihad, at least by giving aid and comfort to jihadist forces. Some of the most influential of the conspirators tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the later (happily unsuccessful) plot to bomb New York City landmarks had spent time in Afghanistan, as part of the mujahideen fighting against the Russians.
A number of defendants in my case were caught in spring 1993 plotting to bomb New York City landmarks (the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex, the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters, and some U.S. military installations, among other targets). Their defense was that they’d been entrapped by the government’s informant. This was implausible since they’d been caught scouting targets and mixing explosives. Nevertheless, they claimed that they had not been hatching simultaneous, post–World Trade Center bombing attacks in New York; rather, they insisted that this had all been training to go to Bosnia and join the mujahideen there in jihad against the Serbs.
Although the Blind Sheikh and other iconic jihadists urged Muslims to go and fight in such “fields of jihad” as Bosnia, it was also considered virtuous, consistent with the Islamic obligation of zakat, to support jihadist fighters with money, arms, and humanitarian assistance.
I’ve written about zakat a number of times (see, e.g., here). It is loosely translated in the West as “charity” — especially by progressive allies of Islamists, to project Islam as (Hamawy might say) benevolent. This misconstrues the term. Zakat is not an obligation to donate to charity, in the abstract. It is the obligation to contribute to the fortification of the Islamic ummah — the global Muslim community.
Zakat, whether in the form of money or other support, may be given only to Muslims. Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (Umdat al-Salik), was compiled by a renowned Muslim scholar, Ahmed ibn Naqib al-Misri in the 14th century, and has been endorsed by al-Azhar scholars and several regimes in Muslim-majority countries. It bluntly instructs that it is impermissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim. Moreover, as I’ve explained before:
An essential purpose of zakat is to underwrite jihad. Americans see it as a dangerous fraud when Islamic charities are used as fronts for terrorist organizations. In mainstream Islam, however, there is no fraud at all — not if your understanding of “charity” is zakat.
“It is obligatory,” according to Reliance of the Traveller, “to distribute one’s zakat among eight categories of recipients, one-eighth of the zakat to each category.” The manual goes on to describe these categories, the seventh of which is “those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster.” [Emphasis added.]
Al-Misri, the 14th-century scholar, did not dream that one up — and there was no al-Qaeda around to “hijack” Islam from him. He pulled it right out of the Koran. Sura 9:60, the verse most often associated with zakat, directs that “alms are for the poor and the needy, and those employed to administer the funds; for those whose hearts have recently reconciled to Truth [i.e., to Islam]; for those in bondage [like those imprisoned terrorists] and in debt; in the cause of Allah [emphasis added]; and for the wayfarer. Thus is it ordained by Allah.” Echoing Reliance, the official Saudi version of the Koran annotates this verse with the clarification that “in the cause of Allah” refers to “those who are struggling and striving in Allah’s cause by teaching or fighting . . . [and] who are thus unable to earn their ordinary living.”
It is unsurprising to learn that a sympathizer and follower of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman would travel to Bosnia to lend medical assistance during an active jihadist conflict. Nor is it mysterious why so many of what our government describes as “charitable fronts,” such as BIF, were found to be supporting jihadists. In Islam, such support is not deceptive “front” activity; it is zakat as classically understood.