—The front-runner in New Jersey’s 12th District wants Israel stripped of the one thing standing between a rocket and a kindergarten.

“It’s like giving a bully body armor to go bully people some more.” That’s Adam Hamawy, on Hasan Piker’s show in April, explaining why he opposes Iron Dome. “We need to be able to have them feel the effects of war, and then they’ll stop.” The bully is Israel. The body armor is the system that catches rockets in midair before they finish the trip someone else started. And the thing Hamawy wants is for it to come off, so the people underneath it can feel what’s been aimed at them.

Six weeks later, days before Tuesday’s primary aimed at New Jersey’s state representatives office, he made a statement finding antisemitism “abhorrent” and saying he’s “deeply worried about its continued rise”—that as a Muslim he understands bigotry, and sees Jewish safety and his own as intertwined. It’s a careful sentence, and it was meant to be. It went to one room. The bully line went to another.

Give Hamawy his strongest case first, because he has one. He’s a combat trauma surgeon who saved Senator Tammy Duckworth’s life in Iraq in 2004 after her Black Hawk went down. In 2024 he volunteered with an international medical team in Gaza, performed roughly 120 surgeries—more than half on children—and........

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