Republican lawmakers and right-wing commentators erupted Tuesday night after Dr. Adam Hamawy, a progressive plastic surgeon and Army veteran, won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District — zeroing in on his decades-old association with a convicted terrorist cleric while largely ignoring his military record and the endorsements of major progressive figures.
Hamawy, 56, who lives in South Brunswick and runs a plastic surgery practice in Princeton, defeated a crowded field of a dozen candidates to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. The Associated Press projected his victory late Tuesday.
His win quickly triggered alarm on the right over his past ties to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” convicted on terrorism and seditious conspiracy charges whose followers carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hamawy, then a medical student in his 20s, testified in Abdel-Rahman’s defense in 1995, had accompanied him on a 1991 trip from New Jersey to Michigan where Abdel-Rahman spoke of “conquering the land of the infidels,” and acknowledged translating a document for the cleric’s press conference even after the bombing.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) called Hamawy “a national security risk” and claimed he “was a defense witness in the 1993 WTC bombing (allegedly with ties to Al-Qaeda)” — erasing the roughly 30 years since those events and Hamawy’s extensive record of military service since that time. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who earlier Tuesday had condemned a colleague’s anti-gay social media post as “absolutely idiotic,” pivoted sharply to demand that Congress “fully investigate his ties to terrorist organizations” if Hamawy wins in November.
The more hyperbolic reactions came from the right-wing influencers. RedState’s Bonchie flatly declared that Democrats had “nominated a guy who served as a defense witness for the World Trade Center bomber and who worked for an Al Qaeda front group,” warning that “Europe’s problems with Islamism are going to happen here.”
What the meltdown largely glossed over: Hamawy is an Army National Guard veteran whom Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) has credited with saving her life after her Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in Iraq in 2004. He also worked as a first responder at Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks. He earned endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, along with support from a new pro-Palestinian super PAC that spent $2 million on his behalf after he volunteered at a Gaza hospital during the war.
Hamawy has said on the campaign trail that he disavows Abdel-Rahman’s calls for violence and has characterized the attacks against him as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.” Most of his Democratic rivals declined to engage the issue, though Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp called him a “radical extremist.”
Not all the concern came from the right. “It is bad that we as Democrats nominated someone who worked for an Al-Qaeda affiliated organization,” Dem strategist Ethan Wolf wrote on X. “We should call balls and strikes and be honest with the American people.”
Liberal host Wajahat Ali, however, called it a “big win.”
“Hamawy ran a boldly unapologetic progressive campaign. Abolish ICE. No corporate money. Against Israel’s genocide,” he said. “And he just endured shameless, ugly, Islamophobic attacks. Didn’t matter.”
Hamawy is now the heavy favorite to win the seat in November. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two-to-one in the 12th District, where Watson Coleman won reelection by 25 points in 2024. His Republican opponent will be Gregg Mele, who has run unsuccessfully for several offices in New Jersey as both a Republican and a libertarian.
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