Parents outraged after speaker shares 'antisemitic' remarks during Mich. school assembly

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. (CITC) — A Michigan public school district is under fire for a "lack of transparency" after a Palestinian-American activist allegedly expressed "antisemitic" sentiments during a diversity assembly.

Bloomfield Hills Schools (BHS), located in suburban Detroit, invited Huwaida Arraf to deliver four presentations during a high school assembly centered around diversity last week. Arraf, who previously ran as a Democratic congressional candidate in Michigan, is the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

ISM is known to advocate for the Palestinian side of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and was previously a subject of a FBI-led international terrorism investigation.

Arraf told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) that BHS student organizers asked her to share her experiences moving to Palestine. While explaining that she worked for a "conflict resolution program" designed to unite Israeli and Palestinian children, Arraf says she noted that individuals cannot be sufficed with "having friends on 'the other side.'"

Dozens of parents, who claim Arraf also labeled Israel as an "oppressor," took to Monday's emergency school board meeting to say their children quickly felt "unsafe" during the presentations.

"An event that was supposed to address bias and promote diversity included a guest speaker that instead encouraged it, inciting hate crimes, divisiveness and fear," one mother said.

Arraf told CITC that BHS leadership warned her during the assembly that some may have perceived her comments as "too political."

BHS has acknowledged that Arraf "deviated from the prompts" during her presentations and promised to launch an investigation into the matter. However, parents are demanding immediate answers, as they say the incident has led to certain students facing bullying and harassment.

"You put them all in a position that they didn't need to be in and that's where the problem is," one father said. "Before you had someone in charge of diversity, these issues didn't really exist as much. Maybe that's the answer to the question."

One mother compared the incident to what her own family experienced while fleeing from "the former USSR due to antisemitism."

"Experiencing the aftermath of that assembly is experiencing that same antisemitism all over again," she said. "Most importantly, you have failed to keep our children safe yet again. You allowed a known political activist to address the entire student body of 1,700 children in the span of not one, but four mandatory assembly sessions. You allowed her to single out Israel and Jews not once, but four times. And after all the uproar from the community, you didn't even have the courage to take accountability and instead passed the buck to the students."

Arraf says any claims that her remarks were antisemitic are "either highly misinformed or an outright lie."

"It is unsurprising that the same special interest groups that have worked so tirelessly for decades to silence Palestinian voices were at the forefront of the attacks on me and on the BHHS student organizers and administration for hosting me," Arraf told CITC. "What is disappointing, is that the Bloomfield Hills school administration has gone along with these vicious, defamatory attacks, intended to detract from my message. These attacks and bogus attempts to conflate talk of Palestinian rights with antisemitism serve to keep Palestinians unseen, and unheard, and in turn, embolden Israel to continue its abuse and subjugation of an entire people yearning to be free."

CITC reached out to BHS for comment, but did not receive a response prior to publication. This story will be updated if a response is received.