Abrar Omeish
Abrar Omeish is Bernie Sanders Virginia campaign co-chair for Bernie Sanders Presidential Campaign 2020. She was elected in 2019 to the Fairfax County School Board. She is the daughter of Libyan-born jihadist sympathizer Esam Omeish, who is former president of the Muslim American Society.
Abrar Omeish is an alum with honors from Yale University, a current dual MPP/JD candidate, and a Blume fellow at Georgetown. She is the first Libyan ever elected in US history and the first Muslim and youngest ever to be elected in her role as School Board Member At-Large in Fairfax County, VA. She oversees a three billion dollar budget for 1.2 million constituents of the nation’s tenth largest school division outside Washington, DC. Abrar co-founded an organization providing thousands of underprivileged youth with free tutoring and mentorship in 20 locations over the past ten years. After serving in several appointed capacities locally and as a senior organizer at the DNC, Abrar served as a legal fellow at a human rights and immigration law firm in Northern Virginia and has been a spokeswoman for the #NoMuslimBanEver campaign. Abrar was most recently a Virginia Co-Chair for the Bernie Sanders campaign and a Virginia PLEO and Rules Committee member to the Democratic National Convention.[1]
Father's radical ties
From the Center for Security Policy[2]
- "The daughter of a radical Islamist operative is a state co-chair of presidential frontrunner Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
- Sanders named Abrar Omeish, daughter of Libyan-born jihadist sympathizer Esam Omeish, as a co-chair of his Virginia campaign on February 18.
- On her own merits, the 24 year-old Abrar Omeish is of little political consequence. She is the youngest person to ever hold office in the state, having been elected in 2019 to the Fairfax County School Board. Her role on the campaign appears to be a Sanders gesture to a more powerful political constituency: the well-organized radical Sunni Islamist networks across the United States. Abrar Omeish’s father is former president of the Muslim American Society, a group identified by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm” of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
- The elder Omeish is best known in Virginia state politics for having been removed from a Virginia Immigration board by then-governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, after a video surfaced of Omeish endorsing violent jihad against Israel.
- Esam Omeish also served on the board of Dar al Hijrah mosque, a Falls Church, Virginia-based mosque with a long history of ties to terrorism finance. Omeish has also been accused of links to terrorism by a Libyan parliamentary security committee. He is a naturalized citizen of the United States."
- Advancing what her father started
- The younger Omeish appears to have followed in her father’s footsteps, including in affiliating with Muslim Brotherhood groups. She has been noted for close ties to the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) an Islamist think tank once raided by federal law enforcement over ties to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fundraising. Abrar served as president of the Muslim Brotherhood-founded Muslim Students Association while at Yale University, participating in an effort to deplatform Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and former Muslim who campaigns for women’s rights.
- Abrar Omeish is not the first Muslim leader with Islamist ties to serve as a surrogate for the Sanders campaign but is another example of the growing political alliance between Islamists and socialists...
MPAC intern
In 2022 Abrar Omeish was a Muslim Public Affairs Council Congressional Leadership Development Program intern in the Department of Education – General Council.
List of Candidates
A report by Jetpac, Council on American-Islamic Relations, and MPower Change called The Rise of American Muslim Changemakers reports:
- "The success of the “My Muslim Vote” campaign was built atop the organizational infrastructure MPower Change has built since its founding.
- MPower has quickly grown to become one of the largest Muslim-led social and racial justice organizations in the United States. It combines digital organizing with grassroots, community-based organizing to conduct campaigns with a diverse set of ally organizations across the U.S. Founded in 2014 by Linda Sarsour, Mark Crain, and Dustin Craun, who collectively brought together more than 40 years of community organizing experience, the intention was to build a grassroots organization rooted in the diverse Muslim communities in the United States. Combining their experiences in faith-based, local, and digital organizing, together they convened a group of leading American Muslim organizers and faith leaders to set the spiritual, political, and organizational vision. Today, MPower Change has developed both a digital organizing team and a field team that leads on the ground organizing in key cities across the U.S.
- "Like other online activist platforms such as Color of Change, MPower Change directly engages with Muslims and ally communities who are interested in community organizing. The diversity of the organizational leadership, the intersectionality of the campaigns and actions supported by the platform, and the strong focus on Muslim values makes MPower Change a unique voice in the Muslim community willing to take on important social justice issues."
Abrar Omeish was on the list of Muslim candidates for office between 2016 - 2018:[3]