Don Arias lost his brother on the worst morning in American history. Now he’s watching the Democrat Party hand primary victories to candidates he says are connected to the very ideology that killed him.
The Democrat establishment can’t explain this away.
And what Arias told Fox News Digital about these primary winners will leave you red with rage.
Arias is an Air Force veteran and former New York firefighter who witnessed the destruction of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His brother worked on the 84th floor of the South Tower and died in the 9/11 attacks.
Arias spoke to his brother, Adam, the morning of the attack after the first plane had already struck the North Tower. Adam described to him the chaos, as desperate victims jumped from the burning skyscraper that once anchored the city’s skyline.
That phone call never left him. And what is happening inside the Democrat Party right now is making sure it never will.
The New Jersey Nominee Nobody Vetted
Dr. Adam Hamawy is a veteran combat plastic surgeon who now operates his own private practice in New Jersey. He won a crowded Democratic primary to replace outgoing Representative Bonnie Watson-Coleman (D-N.J.) in early June.
Hamawy allegedly traveled with and translated for terrorist leader Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” testified at his terrorism trial in ways that reportedly contradicted documentary evidence, and volunteered with the Benevolence International Foundation, an organization later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and identified by the 9/11 Commission as part of Osama bin Laden’s covert financial network.
According to reporting, Hamawy and the sheikh met in 1991, and Hamawy began accompanying Abdel-Rahman to mosques. In the same year, Hamawy, the sheikh, and others took a 13-hour car ride from Abdel-Rahman’s home in New Jersey to a conference in Detroit called “Towards a Global Islamic Economy.”
Abdel-Rahman was ultimately convicted of seditious conspiracy, solicitation to murder Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, conspiracy to murder Mubarak, solicitation to attack a U.S. military installation, and conspiracy to conduct bombings. He died in federal prison in 2017.
Hamawy confirmed at trial that Abdel-Rahman considered the United States and Israel enemies of Islam. At the time, Abdel-Rahman also preached at the Al-Salam Mosque in Jersey City, where the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators met.
Hamawy has pushed back on all of it. He brushed off his connection to Abdel-Rahman as minimal and decades-old, saying he was young when he first encountered the cleric in 1991 and remembers carpooling with him and others on one occasion. He said he testified at the man’s trial out of “a sense of civic duty.” Hamawy himself has not been charged with terrorism or accused by authorities of participating in terrorist activity.
Don Arias isn’t buying it.
“But when he’s pals with the Blind Sheikh, and he’s his translator for several years, when he testifies for him in court saying what a great guy is, when he spends that kind of time with this guy, and then says that he’s never heard him say anything about jihad, I have to question his veracity. I mean, that just doesn’t ring true,” Arias told Fox News Digital. “Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“And if this guy Hamawy is going to try and forget all about that — he wants it to go down the memory hole and say, ‘oh, I was a veteran, you know, I did good stuff’ — I’m not going to forget, and I don’t think people should forget.”
In November, Hamawy will face off against Republican Gregg Mele in what is considered a solidly Democratic district.
The New York State Senate Race That Defies Explanation
New Jersey isn’t the only place this is happening. In New York, a socialist organizer with a documented record of incendiary statements about September 11 just won her primary too.
Aber Kawas, a Palestinian American activist who once dismissed the September 11 attacks as something “a couple of people did,” won her race for New York State Senate District 32, backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
An unearthed clip captured her blaming the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil on “capitalism and racism and white supremacy.” That clip did not stop her from winning. It barely slowed her down.
Kawas also reportedly expressed solidarity for two men later convicted in terrorism cases in a series of now-deleted social media posts from the early-to-mid 2010s. She described Ahmed Ferhani, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to plotting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue, as her “brother … whose family I knew,” according to reporting by the Free Beacon.
She also reportedly hailed Fahad Hashami, who was arrested in 2006 and pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiracy to provide military support to al-Qaeda, claiming he and such prisoners were “living martyrs … teaching us lessons in patience, sacrifice and integrity.”
And Mamdani’s machine celebrated all of it. Kawas’ victory was widely celebrated by the far-left, including the Democratic Socialists of America. “Palestine was on the ballot, and now a Palestinian-American democratic socialist is going to Albany,” the New York City DSA chapter wrote.
Arias pulled no punches about what he sees when he looks at candidates like Kawas.
“For her to minimize 9/11 … it’s just like, ‘oh, some people had some planes,’ you know, it’s beyond the pale,” he told Fox News Digital. “So, when I look at somebody like Kawas, when I look at somebody like Mamdani, I don’t see an American. I mean, you scratch the surface, you see a commie, you see a radical, and — forgive me for saying it — I see a Nazi.”
Kawas declined to answer questions from Fox News Digital, pointing reporters to her social media account instead. Hamawy’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
Who Is Voting for These People?
That is the question Arias keeps coming back to. Not just who the candidates are, but who is putting them over the top.
He blasted the American education system, which he views as a pipeline to far-left activism rather than actual learning. According to Arias, voters for candidates like Hamawy and Kawas are groomed in government schools and in higher education to hold radical beliefs.
“It’s very insidious and it’s very seductive to the young and dumb,” he said. “It’s the young, it’s the dumb, it’s the indoctrinated who are voting for these people in numbers.”
“I don’t know what happens to a person where they actually grow to hate their own country, but I blame universities and the schools for this,” Arias continued.
He’s right to ask. The socialist left has spent decades building an institutional pipeline from campus to campaign office, and the results are showing up in Democrat primary results across the country. These aren’t fringe protest candidates. They are winning.
Kawas’ win came off the back of Mamdani’s three major primary wins in his attempt to remake the Democrat Party into a democratic socialist force. The Mamdani machine is not slowing down. It is accelerating, and the Democrat establishment either can’t stop it or doesn’t want to.
Arias had a word for the ideological engine driving all of it.
He described socialism as a “luxury belief,” and its supporters as mostly young, wealthy, or upper-middle-class people. “These guys are cruising, so they can have these luxury beliefs, these ethereal conversations about mankind. They’re so out of touch.”
But Don Arias is not out of touch. He is the opposite of that. He is a man who picked up the phone on the morning of September 11, 2001, heard his brother describe people falling from a burning tower, and never got to speak to him again. He has spent the years since advocating for families who carry the same weight.
And now he is watching a political party hand nominations to people who, by their own words and associations, treat that morning as a footnote, a talking point, or something America had coming.
The constitutional order that makes religious pluralism possible in this country was built on Judeo-Christian values and the rule of secular law. When political movements use identity and ideology as a substitute for those foundations, they are not expanding the tent. They are replacing what holds it up. Arias understands that instinctively, because he paid for it in the most personal way a person can.
The Democrat Party used to understand it too. Those days appear to be over.
Sources: Fox News Digital, The Blaze, New Jersey Monitor, American Almanac, Queens Daily Eagle, American Bazaar Online, J-Post, Breitbart