Hamas fighters. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

He has publicly endorsed Hamas, and secretly schemed with Hamas’ supporters to thwart US-led peace efforts in the Middle East.

Now Nihad Awad is preparing for a prestigious lecture at Harvard University on how “to inspire a deeper engagement with critical social issues on campus and in the wider community.” He is scheduled to be honored on the first weekend of November with the Phillips Brooks House Association’s “Robert Coles ‘Call of Service’ Lecture and Award.” Past recipients of that honor include former Vice President Al Gore and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman.

A Harvard release describes Awad as “a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding, promoting dialogue and empowering American Muslims.”

That’s extraordinarily generous — because Awad’s words and deeds foster mutual enmity, not understanding.

He was a member of the “Palestine Committee” — a Muslim Brotherhood-created network of organizations operating in the United States, with a mission to help Hamas politically and financially. Awad appears on the committee’s telephone list.

Before creating CAIR, Awad ran a second Palestine Committee entity, called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). The IAP served as a Hamas propaganda arm, publishing the terrorist group’s communiques — as well as articles advocating on its behalf. The FBI described his partner at both IAP and CAIR, Omar Ahmed, as a “leader within the Palestine Committee.”

Again, all of this is drawn from internal Muslim Brotherhood/Palestine Committee records seized by the FBI. They were entered into evidence in a Federal terror financing trial involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That “foundation,” another Palestine Committee entity, and five former officials all were convicted of illegally routing $12 million to Hamas through a network of charities.

All of this information is in the public domain.

So what prompted a Harvard student group to identify Nihad Awad as an inspirational paragon of service?

It turns out that the Phillips Brooks House Association’s programming chair, Anwar Omeish, is the daughter of another advocate for Palestinian violence — former Muslim American-Society President Esam Omeish.

Omeish was forced to resign from a Virginia state immigration panel in 2007 after an exclusive IPT video showed him praising Palestinians for choosing “the jihad way … to liberate your land.”

Awad was present in Omeish’s home during a 2010 political fundraiser where Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minn., accused Israel of controlling US foreign policy.

We are First Amendment supporters, and the Phillips Brooks House Association is free to invite whomever it pleases. But whitewashing Nihad Awad’s decades of work on behalf of terrorists and radicals, however, doesn’t seem to be in the best interests of a group seeking inspiration on the topic of public service.