“We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.”

“Islamic militants beat small children with guns, raped and mutilated women”

When I was doing background research into a Muslim congressional candidate in a New Jersey primary that no one was looking at, what I found blew my mind.

And then some.

I broke the story on the background of Hisham ‘Adam’ Hamawy back in April.

In 1995, ‘Adam’ Hisham Hamawy testified for the defense in the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman: the Egyptian Islamic terror leader linked to the World Trade Center bombing.

Now, Hamawy is running for Congress in New Jersey while promising to defund the military, abolish ICE, and dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.

The Sheikh’s supporters carried out terrorist attacks across Egypt. Others were responsible for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and Rahman was finally convicted of taking part in “a war of urban terrorism against the United States” that targeted the Statue of Liberty and other New York City landmarks. His supporters were caught preparing bombs and at Rahman’s trial, testimony was introduced about Rahman urging an informant to assassinate Egypt’s president.

Rahman’s defense team, led by Lynne Stewart, later convicted of providing material support to terrorists for relaying the terror sheikh’s messages encouraging more attacks, however brought out Hamawy to deny the informant’s claim. The question is why was Hamawy even there?

The setting was a van ride to an Islamic conference in Detroit. The trip had been arranged by Sheikh Rahman, who had demanded a van because there would be six passengers on the trip. Hamawy, apparently sitting behind Rahman, was only one of four others invited to go along.

Emad Salem, the informant, had proposed his car, which seated five, but Rahman rejected it.

“Can you get us something bigger? We are going to be six. Can you get us a van?” he had demanded.

If Adam Hamawy were unimportant, Sheikh Rahman could have dropped him and taken the car. Instead he had insisted that the informant get a van to be able to accommodate all six of them.

Rahman wasn’t just going to conferences, he was traveling around to raise money for what would become Al Qaeda. The terrorists around him were paranoid about spies and security.

So what was Hamawy, now a congressional candidate, doing so close to the terror sheikh?

No one wanted to touch the story including one of the outlets now claiming credit for the story. Hamawy responded by playing the ‘Islamophobia’ card and won his primary with the help of millions of dollars from an Islamic PAC calling itself, ‘American Priorities’.

Hamawy’s seat has been bought and paid for, but Michael Powell at The Atlantic decided to revisit the story and ask him some questions. Hisham Hamawy predictably dodged and ducked the questions, whether those involving the Blind Sheikh, and his ties to other terrorist organizations.

In the summer of 1992, before Hamawy entered medical school, he and two friends took a pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Egypt and London; Hamawy also stopped in Jerusalem. When asked during the trial who had recommended his travel agent, Hamawy answered: “Sheikh Omar.” A friend of the sheikh, he said, accompanied the young men on their flight to London. There, Hamawy testified, they relied on yet another friend of the sheikh, a man who worked in an Islamic bookstore, who found them a youth hostel.

At least two of the men Hamawy and his friends met on that trip, including the bookstore worker, were suspected members of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, prosecutors said. When Hamawy and his friends returned to London on their way home, Hamawy testified, he made sure to call the bookstore worker and thank him for his hospitality. Hamawy was asked during the trial if he knew what Gama’a al-Islamiyya was and said that he had heard of it; asked if he knew any members of the organization, he said, “I assume that Sheikh Omar was, yes.”

Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Blind Sheikh’s terror group, was spun off from the Muslim Brotherhood and was responsible for terror attacks and horrifying atrocities including the Luxor Massacre in 1997.

A year after Rahman was sentenced to life in prison, terrorists from his Muslim Brotherhood splinter organization, the Islamic Group, carried out the Luxor Massacre in Egypt. European tourists had their ears and noses cut off before being killed. The attack had been carried out to take hostages to exchange for Rahman. A note calling for the release of Rahman was found in a disemboweled body.

Islamic militants beat small children with guns, raped and mutilated women, and danced for joy as they massacred tourists at the Hatshepsut temple in Luxor, Swiss survivors said in accounts published yesterday.

“They beat a small child, again and again with a rifle barrel. They were still beating the child after it was already dead,” one weeping eyewitness of Monday’s slaughter told the Zurich newspaper, Blick.

Some 60 people died in the onslaught, at least 33 of them Swiss.

One woman recalled how the militants brutally beat a five-year-old child next to her while dancing and yelling “Allah, Allah”.

Rosemarie Dousse, an elderly survivor of the massacre, said, that the killers “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.”

The foreign dead included 31 Swiss, 10 Japanese, five Germans, four Britons one a child a Bulgarian, a Colombian and a French citizen. The Japanese victims were four newlywed couples and an elderly couple on their second honeymoon.

Witnesses told how the terrorists methodically executed the European tourists. Some were forced to kneel before being shot, while others were stabbed to death.

Among the victims was 5-year-old Shaunnah Turner: a little British girl.

Shaunnah’s dad Richard said after the horror: “In a crowd she would shine. She was really beautiful. She had an impish charm that could win anybody over.”

No big deal. The mention of the evil monsters that did this, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group, is just casually dropped in there.

And that’s what you have to understand about what we’re dealing with here. Anyone with a fraction of humanity or a soul would revile these monsters, disavow ever having anything to do with them, but no.

Two years before the massacre, Hamawy was called to the stand by Rahman’s defense team. Did he lie under oath?

He told the defense lawyer that he had never heard Abdel-Rahman talk about jihad in America. Nor, Hamawy said in reply to a question from the prosecutor, had he heard Abdel-Rahman talk about robbing banks or attacking military bases.

Then one of the prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald, commenced his cross-examination of Hamawy. Do you recall, he asked, if Abdel-Rahman talked about the Egyptian leader Mubarak in Detroit? “Not really,” Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald handed Hamawy a transcript of the sheikh’s speech from the conference and gave him a moment to read it. Then he rephrased his question more pointedly: Do you recall Abdel-Rahman that weekend talking about Mubarak as “the backstabber who became the loyal dog to America?” Hamawy, his memory apparently refreshed, responded: “Yes.”

Fitzgerald asked Hamawy if Abdel-Rahman had talked in his speech about jihad and the importance of conquering the land of the infidels. Hamawy quibbled about wording and definitions but conceded that Abdel-Rahman’s speech centered on “a struggle in the sake of God, yes. It was a jihad.” (Fitzgerald quoted from speeches of Abdel-Rahman’s several times in the trial, making clear what the sheikh meant by that word, jihad. For example: “If God, glory be to him, says do jihad, it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with a missile.”)

As the trial went on, the prosecutor burrowed in, asking if the sheikh had ever described America and Israel as enemies of Islam. Yes, Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald then asked if Hamawy had ever heard Abdel-Rahman say that Muslims have an obligation to carry out jihad against enemies of Islam. “Of course,” Hamawy replied. “That’s what he always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know.”

You know.