Parents Furious After Muslim School Board Member Tells Students to Remember 'Jihad' in Graduation Speech
Northern Virginia parents are understandably outraged after a highly woke graduation speech from a Muslim school board member urged students in Arabic not to forget “jihad.”
Abrar Omeish was tasked with delivering the graduation keynote address for Justice High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, on June 7, where she made sure to tell the students that the world into which they were about to embark is an awful, awful place.
“Our world is overwhelmed with need. We struggle with human greed, racism, extreme versions of individualism and capitalism, white supremacy, growing wealth gaps, disease, climate crisis, extreme poverty amid luxury and waste right next door. And the list goes on,” Omeish said, according to Fox News, which noted that Omeish switched between English, Spanish and Arabic during the address.
“You understand that social justice is only political for those that can afford to ignore it,” she said. “You understand that ‘neutral’ is another word for complicit. And you have made a choice to take a stand.”
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, Omeish’s message changed in at least one part of the speech when she said one thing in English and another in Arabic.
In English, she said, “The world sees the accolade, the diploma, the fruit of all your years yet be reminded of the detail of your struggle,” according to the Daily Mail.
In Arabic, however, according to the newspaper, she told the students to remember their “jihad,” a word that means “holy struggle” and has been used to justify immeasurable death, suffering and bloodshed in the name of Islam, not to mention a lot of oppression and racism.
Rather ironic, don’t you think?
School board member encourages high schoolers to remember ‘jihad’ as they ‘enter a world of white supremacy and capitalism’ during graduation speech – 14 years after her father was fired for using the word- pic.twitter.com/Al3eetQRxX
— Blanche Victoria (@tammytabby) June 14, 2021
As described by The Daily Wire, the ceremony was unusual from the beginning. It was opened by the class president, who referred to the Pledge of Allegiance as “the nation’s anthem,” and changed the wording to say “one nation under Allah.”
Omeish was then introduced by the president of the student government, who explained that the school board member’s father was a “leader and board member of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center.”
Fox News noted that the Fairfax County mosque was “attended by two 9/11 hijackers in 2001, and the radical imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, and Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter.”
One Fairfax County parent who spoke with “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday explained that while Omeish’s graduation speech was certainly shocking, it was par for the course for this radical school board official.
“I think it’s important for your viewers to know that Abrar Omeish’s comments here are incendiary comments, are not the first example of divisive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Gary Aiken told the hosts of the morning show.
He said that several weeks ago, she issued “vile anti-Semitic tweets on her social accounts” from her official “nonpartisan Fairfax County school board page.”
When Omeish faced backlash, she was undeterred, Aiken said.
Her tweets about Israel, he said, “caused huge outrage among over 250,000 Jewish Americans here in Northern Virginia and it sparked outrage across all political lines and there were calls for her to apologize. She offered no apology. She doubled down on it.”
And why wouldn’t she feel empowered to do so, with the mainstream Democratic party demonstrating so little courage to stand up to its radical members in nearby Washington, D.C.? Omeish sounds like Fairfax County’s very own Ilhan Omar. It’s no wonder she felt perfectly comfortable giving this highly inflammatory and divisive speech.
Anti-Semites are faced with virtually no accountability and little condemnation for their vile racism except from those whom they already perceive as their oppressors and enemies, so any criticism is simply perceived as further evidence that they’re right.
Author and former Wall Street Journal columnist Asra Nomani, also speaking with “Fox & Friends,” said that Omeish’s speech was emblematic of the state of public education, which has become inundated with radical ideology.
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“It was indicative of this radicalization that is happening within school boards and school districts and schools across the country, from principals to teachers to political operatives” such as Omeish, Nomani said.
Nomani is absolutely correct. Omeish’s boldness is not just the result of a culture that has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish in the public square, but a culture in which hard-left radicalism has been not only allowed to flourish but has become the common and accepted rhetoric on school boards and in corporate board rooms alike.
No matter how common it has become, however, woke ideology has absolutely no place in American schools or businesses. The Founding Fathers believed that public education would create institutions to train up the kind of informed, critical thinkers that are needed to serve the interest of a functioning constitutional republic.
Clearly, these institutions are no longer serving this purpose — quite the opposite, as it turns out, as they’re routinely subject to an ideology that is inherently opposed to the values needed to uphold our republic.
If you have plans to bring up your kids to respect the flag, understand their rights, and know the one who gave them to us, it’s time to either get your kids out of the public school system — and far away from people like Omeish and her jihad of wokeness — or start taking real action to take back control of them.
And even Americans without children need to get involved. The country’s future is riding on it.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
