CAIR Sues Fairfax Schools Over Hostage-Skit Suspensions
The MSA students staged a hooded-kidnapping skit weeks after October 7. Two CAIR attorneys on the case have publicly endorsed "Globalize the intifada" and defended convicted Hamas financiers.
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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on June 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The suit is brought on behalf of four Muslim Student Association (MSA) members at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) and seeks to vacate suspensions handed down after the students staged a mock-kidnapping skit on social media weeks after the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks.
The complaint names Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), Superintendent Michelle Reid, and TJHSST Principal Michael Mukai, alleging violations of the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit lands while FCPS remains one of only three U.S. school districts under a House Title VI investigation for its handling of antisemitism — a probe whose opening letter explicitly cited this video as evidence of a hostile environment for Jewish students.
Two of the CAIR attorneys named on the complaint have public records that raise questions of their own: Staff Attorney Ahmad Kaki posted “Globalize the intifada” on X in June 2025, while Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas referred to the five convicted Holy Land Foundation defendants — the largest Hamas-financing case in U.S. history — as “unjustly convicted.”
The Skit and the Suspensions
The TJHSST MSA video, posted October 24, 2025, was filmed during lunch period in the school’s prayer room. After two students declined an on-camera invitation to attend an MSA meeting, classmates threw a keffiyeh over one student’s head, placed another in a plastic bin, and dragged both away, ending with the caption “no one was harmed in the making of this video.” One participant wore a sweatshirt depicting Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza filled with the colors of the Palestinian flag. A near-identical Langley High School MSA video that same week showed classmates hooding a student and throwing him into a car trunk.
FCPS condemned the videos as “traumatizing… especially to our Jewish students, staff, and community.” The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington stated it was “appalled” that students used unauthorized accounts bearing FCPS school names “to imitate hostage-taking and violent deaths” while Hamas “continues to hold the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages.” Four students received in-school suspensions that, according to the complaint, remain on their permanent records. CAIR’s filing alleges concrete downstream harm — one student rejected from every college applied to, another disqualified from a prestigious internship program, and continued harassment including deepfakes circulated online.
Who CAIR Sent
CAIR’s legal team on the complaint includes Staff Attorney Ahmad Kaki and Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas, alongside Catherine Keck and John M. Fossum. On June 25, 2025, Kaki posted the words “Globalize the intifada” from his X account @AKPalestine, where he describes himself as a “Palestinian baba and civil rights lawyer.” He quote-tweeted a post celebrating that Israeli strikes “didn’t work at all.” The slogan has been widely condemned as a call to extend anti-Jewish violence globally. Kaki is quoted in CAIR’s June 4 press release accusing FCPS of believing “that Muslims and Arabs pose a threat where others do not.”
Abbas, listed in CAIR’s media contacts on the lawsuit, appeared at a CAIR fundraising event where he characterized the five convicted Holy Land Foundation defendants as “unjustly convicted” and appeared to advocate for a presidential pardon.
The Holy Land Foundation Five were convicted in November 2008 on 108 counts of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas — the FBI called it the largest victory against terrorist financing in the United States since 9/11. The convictions were upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011, with the appeals court affirming sentences that rested on terrorism enhancements finding the defendants supported Hamas “in order to rid Palestine of the Jewish people through violent jihad.” CAIR itself was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.
The Backdrop
As Jewish Onliner previously noted, he MSA was founded in 1963 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood at the University of Illinois and, according to internal Brotherhood documents introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, was deliberately designed as a recruitment pipeline for the Brotherhood’s American network. MSA National today operates 162 affiliated chapters across U.S. and Canadian campuses and high schools. The TJHSST and Langley videos appeared weeks after MSA chapters across Fairfax County organized “Kuffiyeh Week” protests timed to the October 7 anniversary.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg’s November 2025 letter opening the FCPS Title VI investigation specifically cited “MSA chapters reenacting the October 7th kidnappings in a promotional video” as evidence of a worsening hostile environment for Jewish students. The letter documented years of prior incidents in FCPS, including Jewish students enduring “Heil Hitler” salutes, coins thrown at them, a hallway display in which 40 percent of tiles featured swastikas and Nazi flags, and an MSA-hosted speaker who had tweeted he had “never met a Jew who didn’t have a huge nose.”
The Collision
CAIR is now asking a federal court to declare the same conduct constitutionally protected speech. FCPS responded that it had not yet reviewed the filing but that “all student disciplinary issues are handled individually.”
The federal court now asked to vindicate the students will weigh constitutional claims advanced by attorneys whose own public record — one endorsing “Globalize the intifada,” the other casting the largest Hamas-financing convictions in U.S. history as unjust — sits uneasily alongside the question of what, exactly, the students were depicting in a hooded-victim skit posted weeks after October 7.