A Mamdani-Backed Socialist Won a Queens Senate Primary. Then a 2017 Tape on 9/11 Resurfaced.

On June 23, 2026, Palestinian American organizer Aber Kawas (D, DSA) won the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th State Senate District — a deep-blue Queens seat covering Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Maspeth — defeating Assemblyman Steven Raga with roughly 60% of the vote. Because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic, the nomination puts her on track to win the seat being vacated by Sen. Michael Gianaris (D) in November.

Kawas ran with the endorsement of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D, DSA) and the city’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Days before and after the primary, a clip from a 2017 podcast resurfaced in which Kawas discussed the September 11 attacks — and Fox News, the New York Post’s orbit, and conservative activists framed it as a candidate suggesting America brought 9/11 on itself.

This page lays out exactly what she said, in full context and verbatim, where the resurfaced clip came from, how Mamdani is tied to her, and how she answered. We quote the tape word-for-word rather than paraphrase a decade-old conversation into something sharper than the record supports — because on a subject this charged, the words themselves are the story.

• State Senate Dist. 12 — the Queens seat Aber Kawas (D, DSA) won the Democratic primary for on June 23, 2026, succeeding retiring Sen. Michael Gianaris (D) · Source: Queens Daily Eagle; Fox News
• ~60% — Kawas's share of the primary vote, defeating Assemblyman Steven Raga in a heavily Democratic district · Source: Fox News; Western Journal
• 2017 — the year of the resurfaced clip — an Asian American Writers' Workshop podcast titled 'Islamophobia Beyond 9/11 with Aber Kawas' · Source: Mediaite; Asian American Writers' Workshop
• Mamdani-endorsed — Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D, DSA) endorsed Kawas during a closed-door DSA meeting; three other Mamdani-backed candidates also won NY primaries the same night · Source: Jewish Insider; CNN
• 'Cherry-picked' — how Kawas characterized the resurfaced clip, telling Fox News Digital she was rebutting the idea that Muslims must apologize for 9/11 · Source: Fox News

The race itself was not close. In a Queens district that has not elected a Republican to the State Senate in living memory, Kawas — a 30-something community organizer who served as youth-activities director for the Arab American Association of New York — beat sitting Assemblyman Steven Raga (D) by roughly two-to-one. Her win was part of a broader night for the New York DSA: three Mamdani-aligned congressional candidates also prevailed, and conservative and centrist commentators alike read the results as the mayor extending his coalition into Albany and Washington.

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What turned a local primary into a national story was a clip. Activist Drew Pavlou had preserved material from one of Kawas’s old accounts, and a 2017 podcast appearance began circulating — amplified this week by pro-Trump activist Greg Price and outlets including The Daily Wire, Fox News, and the Washington Free Beacon. The recording, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s “Islamophobia Beyond 9/11 with Aber Kawas,” is roughly nine years old. Its subject was Islamophobia — but a stretch of it deals directly with how Kawas frames the September 11 attacks, and that is the stretch critics seized on.

Here is the line at the center of the controversy, transcribed verbatim from the 2017 conversation. Discussing what she described as a long history of empire and prejudice, Kawas said:

“The system of capitalism and racism and white supremacy et cetera — and Islamophobia — have all been used to colonize lands, to take resources from other people, and so this is a long trajectory, and we're just seeing the manifestations of that continuation with 9/11.”

Aber Kawas, 2017 — 'Islamophobia Beyond 9/11,' Asian American Writers' Workshop

A second passage from the same appearance, reported by Jewish Insider, is what critics point to as the more dismissive moment. Objecting to the expectation that Muslims condemn the attacks, Kawas said it was “reprehensible” that — in her telling — Muslims are pressed to apologize while other historical atrocities go unaddressed:

“The idea that we have to apologize for a terror attack that a couple of people did … and then there is no apologies or reparations for genocides and for slavery, et cetera, is something that I kind of find reprehensible.”

Aber Kawas, 2017 — quoted by Jewish Insider

Two accuracy notes belong here. First, the verbatim record does not contain the phrase “America deserved 9/11” — that is the headline framing applied by Fox News and others, characterizing the meaning they take from her words; her actual sentences place the attacks within a “long trajectory” of empire and call the demand for Muslim apology “reprehensible.” Second, the comments are from 2017, roughly four years before she entered electoral politics. Both facts matter to a fair reading. So does the third: the words are hers, on tape, and she has not disowned them.

Kawas is a Palestinian American organizer who built her profile in Arab and Muslim community advocacy in New York before running for office. She originally filed for a Queens Assembly seat, then repositioned for the open State Senate District 12 once Gianaris announced his exit. Her platform is standard NYC-DSA fare: housing affordability, public transit, tenant protections, and abolishing ICE. If she wins the general election, she would be among the first Palestinian American women to hold New York State office — a milestone her supporters emphasized on primary night.

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The Mamdani connection is specific, not vague. According to Jewish Insider, the mayor endorsed Kawas during a closed-door meeting with the Democratic Socialists of America — one of a slate of DSA candidates he backed for state and federal seats. That endorsement is precisely what made the resurfaced tape a national item rather than a local one: a sitting mayor with presidential-tier media attention had put his name behind a candidate whose old comments on 9/11 were, at minimum, easy to weaponize. Critics cast it as a window into the politics of Mamdani’s coalition; the campaign cast it as a smear.

Kawas’s win did not happen in isolation. The same night, Mamdani-aligned candidates ousted established Democrats in congressional primaries, prompting the Washington Free Beacon to dub the cohort the “mini-Mamdanis” and President Trump to post a string of reactions branding the winners “Communists.” The 9/11 tape became the sharpest single artifact in a larger argument about how far left the New York Democratic Party’s nominating electorate has moved.

Conservative outlets also surfaced other old material attributed to Kawas — including deleted blog posts expressing solidarity with convicted figures and a long record of anti-Israel activism — reported by Breitbart, the Free Beacon, and the Jerusalem Post. We flag those as separately reported allegations, sourced to screenshots of deleted accounts rather than to a clean primary record, and we do not fold them into the 9/11 quote, which is on tape and undisputed. The distinction is the point: the verbatim 9/11 comments stand on their own; the rest is a wider dossier readers can weigh on its own sourcing.

Kawas did not deny saying the words. She reframed them. Asked by Fox News Digital, she said the clip was cherry-picked and that she had been “speaking about the harmful notion that Muslims should have to apologize for an act of violence they have nothing to do with,” adding that “the people of Queens simply don’t buy into this kind of desperate, Islamophobic smear.” Her campaign cast the entire episode as a right-wing attempt to relitigate a decade-old academic conversation about Islamophobia.

“In this interview I was speaking about the harmful notion that Muslims should have to apologize for an act of violence they have nothing to do with.”

Aber Kawas, responding to Fox News Digital, June 2026

An honest account holds both things. The Fox headline’s “America deserved 9/11” is a characterization, not a quotation — Kawas never said those words, and the comments predate her candidacy by years. But what she did say is on the record and unretracted: she located the deadliest terror attack on American soil within a “long trajectory” of Western wrongdoing and called the expectation of a Muslim apology “reprehensible.” Voters in District 12 nominated her knowing it. That is the fact that survives every framing dispute.

Aber Kawas (D, DSA) is the Democratic nominee for a Queens State Senate seat, endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and carried by roughly 60% of primary voters. A 2017 podcast clip — verifiable, dated, and hers — shows her framing 9/11 as part of a “long trajectory” of capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia, and dismissing the demand for Muslim apology as “reprehensible.” She calls the clip a cherry-picked smear; she does not dispute saying it. The “America deserved it” headline is sharper than the tape. The tape itself does not need sharpening. As the November general election approaches in a district she is favored to win, we’ll track whether the comments follow her into office — and how the Mamdani coalition answers for the candidates it elevates.

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Last updated June 26, 2026