NJ Muslim Congress Candidate Volunteered for Al Qaeda Group

We’ve spent a lot of time covering the story of Hisham ‘Adam’ Hamawy, an Egyptian Muslim running for Congress in New Jersey, backed by $2M in Muslim tech money, who had accompanied Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the ‘Blind Sheikh’ linked to the WTC terror attacks and the later plots to bomb the Statue of Liberty and other New York City targets, and who had developed ties to Al Qaeda and its leadership, as a translator and testified on his behalf at his terror trial.

Somehow though the Hamawy story keeps getting worse, as Jewish Insider reports, he also volunteered for an Al Qaeda linked group.

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.”

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.

According to evidence federal prosecutors proffered in court, and the affidavits of federal agents, the 2002 raids on the Bosnian offices recovered weapons; correspondence between the group’s chief executive, Enaam Arnaout, and bin Laden from the 1980s and 1990s; letters from other Al-Qaida leaders on battles and financial transactions; a photo of Arnaout and bin Laden together; an organizational chart of Al-Qaida; a handwritten list of top donors to the terror organization; copies of never-before-seen documents concerning Al-Qaida’s 1988 founding and its admission policies; and details regarding training camps and Al-Qaida operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan.

When we exposed Hisham ‘Adam’ Hamawy’s terror ties before, he responded by accusing us of being “anti-Islam” and the whole thing of being “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates”, but if you spend this much time being associated with Islamic terrorists, maybe there’s some ‘guilt’ there.

Hamawy was clearly plugged into a terrorist network and the Blind Sheikh allegedly had ties to another player in the Egyptian congressional candidate’s orbit.

In the New York area, BIF [Benevolence International] was represented by a senior Bosnian diplomat and “Minister Counsellor” at the Bosnian Mission to United Nations in Manhattan: Saffet Abid Catovic… testifying in Immigration court, Catovic denied supporting the blind Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman (head of the Egyptian Al-Gama`at AlIslamiyya terror organization) but nonetheless added, “I admire his recitation of the Koran…[h]e’s a blind man who recites Koran very beautifully.” During his testimony, Catovic also admitted to having met Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the current General Secretary of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), “once or twice” at terrorist fundraising conferences held in the United States by the Tampa-based Islamic Committee for Palestine

New York police who arrested El Sayyid Nosair, the assassin of militant Jewish leader Meir Kahane and co-conspirator in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, found Saffet Catovic’s business card from the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation amongst Nosair’s personal effects. In a videotaped theological lecture published by an Islamic media outlet in New Jersey, Catovic introduced Siddig Ali (also later convicted of a central role in a fundamentalist conspiracy to bomb New York landmarks in 1993) to speak on the subject of “Jihad: The Forgotten Duty.”

On November 24, 2000, the Dorral Forrestal Conference Center in Princeton, New Jersey hosted a three-day local Muslim “spiritual retreat.” One of the speakers at the event was Saffet Catovic, whose lecture was titled “Political and Social Jihad.” In an article about the retreat, the author explained, “Brother Saffet Catovic has been active in the Bosnian Jihad for many years.”

Between August 20-26, 2001, Catovic was a featured invitee and speaker at a “Jihad Camp” organized for Muslim men between the ages of 14 and 25, sponsored by the northeast regional branch of the “Young Muslims of North America.”

One of the other lecturers at the Jihad Camp (who has teamed up with Catovic at many other speaking events) was Imam Siraj Wahaj, a radical African-American Muslim cleric, listed by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in 1995 as an “unindicted person who may be alleged as [a] conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Catovic and Hamawy were predictably associates.

An imam, Catovic has remained prominent in New Jersey politics and religious affairs, and last fall hosted Hamawy on a YouTube panel discussion of the Gaza conflict. Members of Catovic’s family have donated to Hamawy’s congressional campaign, Federal Election Commission records show.

What emerges is a picture of a congressional candidate who was plugged into a Jhadist network that went all the way up to Al Qaeda.

As I noted in yesterday’s article, the Blind Sheikh paved the way for 9/11.

Hamawy claimed that the Blind Sheikh “was a leader of the community” and taught “how to practice as a normal Muslim.” A few years after Hamawy had testified for the terror sheikh, Osama bin Laden had held a press conference featuring two of Rahman’s sons who handed out cards with their father’s picture and his Islamic call to attack America. “A fatwa of the captive Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman … To all Muslims everywhere: Destroy their countries. Tear them to pieces. Destroy their economies, burn their corporations, destroy their businesses, sink their ships, and bring down their airplanes. Kill them in the sea, on land, and in the air.” Several years later, the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda.

I don’t know if Hamawy would officially qualify as an Al Qaeda candidate, but at the rate that Islamic Jihadism is being mainstreamed, we’re bound to have one before long. The only question is whether it will be in New Jersey or Michigan.