You might be asking, what could be worse than a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo?
How about a House candidate who did some work for al-Qaeda?
Adam Hamawy’s past relationship with terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman has loomed over his rapid rise in the race to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ). . . .
But just one year before Hamawy took the witness stand to describe his travels with Abdel-Rahman, the now-Congressional candidate made a different journey with another party entangled in terrorist conspiracies: to Bosnia, with a group subsequently shut down for providing “logistical support” to Al-Qaida.
In a 1996 interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, according to a copy Jewish Insider recovered through an archive of print publications, Hamawy described volunteering in Bosnia during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the “Benevolence International Foundation.”
“I worked in Sarajevo for 10 days and then the rest in Zenica, a large regional center in central Bosnia,” Hamawy, who had just graduated from medical school, told the paper about the five weeks he spent with the organization. “We went out to hospitals around the area and in the mountains to check what supplies they needed and we tried to deliver them.”
Sarajevo and Zenica were the exact cities where Benevolence International maintained its offices — offices that Bosnian authorities raided in 2002, part of a joint effort with U.S. authorities to dismantle the group, which they had identified as a front for Al-Qaida. The 9/11 Commission Report would later identify the foundation’s base in the Bosnian capital as part of the “impressive array of offices [that] covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities” that Osama bin Laden established in the early 1990s.
Well, that explains why Hamawy didn’t list a reference for his work for the Benevolence International Foundation on his résumé. His boss was killed in Pakistan in 2011.
Now, you can hear the spin already: It was the kindler, gentler, pre-9/11 al-Qaeda. It was a front for al-Qaeda, not al-Qaeda central. It was Diet al-Qaeda. It was a long time ago, and as far as we know, Hamawy has done very little work for other terrorist groups since then. It was only five weeks. He was lazy and really didn’t do that much work for them.