On Oct. 12, Abrar Omeish, an at-large member on Fairfax County’s school board, objected to calling for a moment of silence for the innocent victims of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Omeish asserted that she did not support the dominance of one side’s narrative.
A suburb of Washington, D.C., Fairfax County’s school district is the eighth largest in the nation, with a $3.5 billion budget and 181,000 enrolled students. Like many other school board members across the country, Omeish uses her position at the dais to grandstand about issues that have little or nothing to do with our children’s public education.
Omeish stated that by proposing the moment of silence, her colleagues on the school board had engaged in a “sneak attack” against her. “We often sympathize with and humanize the side that … our biases guide us toward, but doing so obscures the root of the violence,” she said, adding that the adage, “No justice, no peace” is relevant for the situation in Israel.
Many of her colleagues on the school board left the dais as she was speaking, likely as a protest to her remarks. Despite some turbulence along the way, the 12 Democrat-endorsed Fairfax County school board members maintained a tenuous, unholy alliance, in which they voted almost unanimously on every single dysfunctional political initiative for the last four years.
Their alliance has withstood Omeish’s previous demonstrations of anti-Americanism on the school board. In June 2021, as a school board member speaking at a high school graduation ceremony, she told the graduates they should remember their “jihad” because they were about
