The most radical member of the most radical school board in Virginia, Fairfax County’s Abrar Omeish, has declined to run for reelection, citing the toll of investigations into the school system.
Omeish voted against a resolution honoring the victims of 9/11; her father was vice president of a mosque attended by multiple 9/11 terrorists and whose imam was Anwar Al-Awaki, who was later killed by a drone in Yemen where he was serving as an Al Queda operative.
Omeish told graduates at a heavily-minority school that they were entering a world of “capitalism” and “white supremacy” and encouraged them to remember “jihad” and reject objectivity, and pictures at another graduation showed her declining to stand for the pledge of allegiance.
Most recently, she called Iwo Jima, the battle where Americans heroically fought an Axis power, “unfortunate” and “evil.”
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and state Attorney General Jason Miyares have launched numerous investigations into apparent racism and other issues at Fairfax schools, including a change to magnet school admissions that a court found was aimed at reducing the number of Asians, and sending a flyer that excluded whites and Asians from a tutoring opportunity.
Fairfax Now reported Thursday that Omeish said she will not run for reelection this year, “because of how stifling these investigations have been on the ability of our school system to implement real change.”
The move is a sign that Youngkin is having an effect on Northern Virginia’s school systems, which have become openly partisan and defied an executive order requiring them to lift mask mandates–instead imposing severe sanctions, even as they advocated for “restorative justice” for violent offenses.
Fairfax County’s budget comes largely from property values that are propped up by people seeking good schools, but Omeish lashed out that one well-performing school was “lily-white.” A presentation from a consultant commissioned by the district said it wants “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”
Using lawyers from the Islamist group CAIR, which her father is affiliated with, Omeish sued police after they pepper-sprayed her for refusing to get out of her car or show them her license during a traffic stop, instead screaming “Help, a cop is being brutal!” She claimed the police targeted her because of her race, even though dashcam footage showed her speeding through a red light, and that her appearance was not visible to the officer when he pulled her over.
Omeish’s father, Esam Omeish, ran for state delegate but lost after video emerged of him declaring that Islam must “become the dominant religion of the next century” and endorsing jihad. As the book Race to the Bottom reported, “Esam was also president of the Muslim American Society; a 2019 video from an MAS facility showed children being trained to sing, ‘We will chop off their heads… We will lead the army of Allah.”
Omeish lives with her father and has no children. She was an at-large member of the school board, with more than one million constituents.