NJ-12: A Candidate's Past Ties to a Militant Cleric Are Surfacing in a N.J. House Race

Dr. Hamawy has led the race for campaign cash and has landed endorsements from such left-wing luminaries as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Hasan Piker of the internet, who appeared with him on Saturday for a get-out-the-vote rally in Trenton. A newly formed pro-Palestinian political action committee, American Priorities, has spent more than $1.5 million on ads that highlight Dr. Hamawy’s work as a surgeon — a figure that dwarfs the campaign budgets of every other candidate.

His critics have been trying with growing urgency to highlight an earlier part of Dr. Hamawy’s history: a gap year the future surgeon spent between graduating from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1991 and entering the university’s medical school the next year.

It was then that Dr. Hamawy began spending time with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind, militant Islamist who lived and preached in New Jersey. Four years later, Mr. Abdel Rahman would be tried and convicted of inspiring violence that contributed to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He died in 2017 while serving a life sentence.

During Mr. Abdel Rahman’s trial in 1995, Dr. Hamawy, then 26, was called as a defense witness by the sheikh’s lawyers as they tried to undermine the federal government’s star witness, Emad Salem, who was paid $1 million by federal officials while working as an informant and also admitted lying under oath. Mr. Salem had testified that during a road trip to Detroit the sheikh had encouraged him to kill a former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. (Prosecutors had also charged Mr. Abdel Rahman with being at the center of a plot to assassinate the president during a planned visit to New York in 1993.)





https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/nyregion/adam-hamawy-election-nj.html