Adam Hamawy, who won the Democratic primary for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District on Tuesday night, said he supports activist groups that monitor and protest immigration enforcement, comparing their efforts to those of non-Jews who helped hide Jews during the Holocaust.
In a video provided to JNS by Canary Mission, Hamawy made the remarks during a Twitch livestream with far-left commentator Hasan Piker.
“If communities are organizing to help their neighbors, this is what happened in Nazi Germany, right?” Hamawy said. “People were organizing to help the Jewish community be able to hide and to protect them.”
He added that similar efforts are taking place today to help immigrants facing deportation.
“Unfortunately, we are doing it now in this country to help our undocumented brothers and sisters,” Hamawy said. “And it’s not just undocumented. They are attacking documented immigrants. They are attacking U.S. citizens as well. So when we allow one group of people to be attacked, it’s just a matter of time before it expands to everyone.”
Hamawy said he supports such activism when it takes the form of “peaceful protest, peaceful demonstration.”
A plastic surgeon, Army combat veteran and first-time candidate, Hamawy won the Democratic nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) in the heavily Democratic district. He will face Republican Gregg Mele in November.
Hamawy, who is Muslim, has also faced scrutiny over past ties to Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “blind sheikh” convicted of terrorism in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hamawy has defended his past interactions with Abdel Rahman and has denied supporting extremism.
Longtime Democratic operative Sara Forman told JNS that “it’s appalling that a Democratic nominee to the United States Congress was not subjected to intense scrutiny once it became known that he served as a character witness of behalf of the convicted ‘Blind Sheikh’ terrorist.”
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told JNS that he would “not be surprised” to see a Hamawy endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America, pointing to a DSA Abolish ICE Commission statement on Tuesday in solidarity with an anti-ICE hunger strike in New Jersey.
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, said, “I don’t understand how someone who is running for office to make laws and enforce our laws is promoting and praising people who are stopping federal employees who are enforcing our U.S. immigration laws.”
Klein, who emigrated from Germany to the United States with his parents in 1951, said that his family completed background checks and studied how the U.S. government operates before obtaining citizenship. “Only then were we sworn in as U.S. citizens,” he said. “I still have the pictures of me and my parents in court waving the American flag upon our induction as citizens.”
As a child of holocaust survivors, who lost most of my family in the Holocaust, I find his analogy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement federal employees enforcing U.S. laws to Nazis who intentionally murdered millions of Jews as painful, ludicrous and odious,” he told JNS.
Jayne Zirkle, communications director for End Jew Hatred, told JNS that “the Holocaust should not be used as a political analogy to score points in unrelated policy disputes.”
“When public figures invoke Nazi-era persecution to describe issues that bear no resemblance to the systematic extermination of a people, they distort history and contribute to the growing erosion of Holocaust understanding,” Zirkle said.
