Two Years of His Life — and Mohamad Hamad Still Hasn’t Had a Trial

A Lebanese-American activist from right here in western Pennsylvania has spent nearly a year and a half in a maximum-security cell — never charged with terrorism, never convicted of anything, and runn

Let me start with the part most people won’t tell you, because I’d rather you hear it from me than from a Fox News chyron: the government’s charges against Mohamad Hamad are serious. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending this is a story about spray paint.

So here’s the whole thing, plainly:

In the summer of 2024, two Pittsburgh buildings — the Chabad of Squirrel Hill and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh — were marked in washable red paint with slogans like “Jews 4 Palestine” and an inverted triangle. Mohamad and a co-defendant, Talya Lubit — herself a Jewish anti-Zionist — were charged with damaging religious property. Those were misdemeanors. Mohamad was released on home detention, where, by his own probation officer’s testimony, he spent six months without a single violation.

Then, in April 2025, the government came back with a superseding indictment and a very different story: that Mohamad had conspired to build and detonate homemade explosive devices, and that he had lied to federal investigators while seeking a security clearance connected to his role in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. On the strength of those new allegations, a judge ordered him held pending trial. He has been in a cell ever since.

That is the case. Now let me tell you what I actually think about it — and why your money matters.

One: he has not been convicted of anything.** Not the graffiti, not the explosives, not the false statements. Every line above is an *allegation*. In this country we are told, endlessly, that a person is innocent until a jury says otherwise. Mohamad has never seen that jury. He has been caged for nearly eighteen months on the government’s say-so, and the government is in no hurry to prove its case in the one venue that is supposed to matter.

Two: the punishment is already happening, before any verdict.** A year and a half in maximum security. His supporters say long stretches in solitary. Still no trial date. Sit with what that means: the state does not need to *win* to destroy your life. It only needs to take your time — your years, your work, your schooling, your family’s provider — and run out the clock while you wait. That is a scandal whether or not you believe Mohamad is guilty. Pretrial detention this long, on charges this contested, is punishment dressed up as procedure.

Three: watch how the state manufactured its own justification.** Six months of flawless compliance on home detention. Then, suddenly, the raids — his family says the FBI hit their home more than once, flew drones and helicopters over it, and put a tracking device on his car. When you spend that kind of taxpayer money surveilling a young Arab man, you had better come back with something big enough to justify it. The leap from a misdemeanor paint charge to a full federal terrorism *narrative* is not a coincidence. It is how the machine feeds itself.

Four: they never actually charged him with terrorism** — and they know it. There is no terrorism count in this indictment. What there is instead is theater. At his *detention* hearing, prosecutors reportedly played footage of the October 7 attacks — an atrocity Mohamad had nothing to do with — and referred to him as “Mr. Hamas.” They have paraded his angry social media posts and private messages as though rage at a genocide were itself a crime. Understand what that is. The word “terrorist” does work that evidence cannot. Once they hang it on you, the question quietly stops being *did the state prove its case* and becomes *how much of its power are we willing to watch it use against him.*

We have seen this movie before. We saw it with the Holy Land Five — Palestinian Muslim fathers who ran the largest charity for Palestine in America, buried under decades in prison in the post-9/11 panic, two of them still serving what amount to life sentences. We saw it with Tarek Bazrouk in New York, whose case the movement only rallied around after it was too late to change his sentence. The vocabulary of “terrorism” has always been this state’s favorite instrument for turning Arab and Muslim dissent into something the public can be trained to fear. Mohamad is simply the newest name on a very long list.

And here is the part that should shame us: for more than a year, much of our own movement looked away. Afraid of the “terrorism” smell. Afraid the graffiti sat too close to a synagogue. Afraid that defending him would cost something. From inside, Mohamad wrote that being abandoned by his own allies gave him “a small but beautiful taste of how it feels to be Palestinian.” Read that again. That is what isolation does to a person. And when we abandon our prisoners, the only winner is the state.

I am not interested in being one more person who looked away.

So here is what your money actually does: it buys him a lawyer. Not a metaphor, not a movement — an experienced attorney who knows how to fight a political prosecution, in place of an overworked public defender who, by Mohamad’s account, even barred him from speaking to the press. That is the difference between a defense and a formality. Whatever you believe about the underlying allegations, every person dragged into a federal courtroom deserves someone in their corner who is genuinely fighting. That principle *is* the whole ballgame. If it only applies to the people we find convenient, it does not exist at all.

The fund is roughly $10,000 short of its goal, with a deadline of October 5 to secure that counsel. If you can give, give. If you cannot, share this — with your name on it, not anonymously. Solidarity that hides is just abandonment with better manners.

DONATE to Mohamad Hamad’s legal defense:

https://chuffed.org/project/162662-justice-for-palestines-voice-help-mohamad-get-a-lawyer?utm_campaign=campaign_share&utm_id=019cb7f0-e843-727b-b501-136cd0f151df&pdm=url_copy

They have had two years to bring their case before a jury, and they still have not done it. The very least the rest of us can do is make sure that when they finally do, Mohamad Hamad is not standing there alone.

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