Adam Hamawy, the Democrat nominee for New Jersey's 12th Congressional District, was asked point-blank about far-left streamer Hasan Piker's infamous declaration that "America deserved 9/11, dude." His response? "I think we have to put it all in perspective. And I do believe he regrets saying that."

He then added: "I still love the guy though."

Hamawy — a retired Army surgeon endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — made the comments during an interview with Walter Masterson. Masterson himself chimed in with "I love Hasan Piker" and offered this defense of the streamer's 2019 remarks: "If I had to ramble for eight hours, I don't know what would come out."

Piker made the statement during a 2019 livestream. He later called his own words "inappropriate," which is the kind of word you use when you burp at a dinner party, not when you tell a nation of 330 million people they deserved to watch 3,000 of their neighbors burn alive. Piker also has a history of mocking former Representative Dan Crenshaw's war injury — Crenshaw lost an eye serving as a Navy SEAL — and has called Orthodox Jews "inbred."

This is the man Hamawy still loves.

The Piker defense is bad enough on its own. But Hamawy's background makes it worse. Hamawy testified as a defense witness at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman — the "Blind Sheikh" convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting terror attacks against the United States. Hamawy also worked with a Bosnia-based nonprofit in 1994 that was later shut down over ties to Al-Qaeda.

None of that disqualifies someone from running for office. But when that same person, decades later, goes on camera and tells you he loves the streamer who said America deserved the worst terrorist attack in its history — the pattern starts to look less like coincidence and more like conviction.

The "put it all in perspective" line is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What perspective, exactly? The perspective of the families who set extra places at Thanksgiving for twenty-five years because Dad never came home from work on September 11th? The perspective of the first responders still dying of cancers they got from breathing in the dust of their own colleagues?

That's the constituency Hamawy wants to represent. Those are the voters he's asking to send him to Washington. And his message to them is that the guy who said their loved ones deserved to die just needs to be understood in context.

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez both endorsed Hamawy. Neither has commented on his Piker defense. When asked if he followed Piker's content, Hamawy said, "I wasn't following his Twitch stream" — which isn't quite a denial and isn't quite an answer.