BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP (WWJ) — A Bloomfield Township trustee has been censured for comments she posted on social media last week.
The Board of Trustees on Monday night voted 6-1 to censure Trustee Stephanie Fakih for posts that referred to Israeli and American Zionists as “scum of the earth.” The vote came after about three hours of emotional public comment. Fakih was the only trustee to vote “no.”
David Kurzmann with the Jewish Federation of Detroit attended the meeting and told WWJ Newsradio 950’s Charlie Langton that he was in support of censuring Fakih, who he said showed no remorse.
“She spoke at the beginning of the meeting, but offered no apology at all and seemed to not understand the impact of her words,” Kurzmann said. “We hoped this could lead to an educational moment for Stephanie Fakih. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much of a sign last night that she intends to try to better understand our community.”
Zionism, according to Kurzmann, is “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”
“In calling not only Israeli Zionists, but American Zionists ‘scum of the earth,’ she demeaned and dehumanized an entire population. The vast majority of Jewish people are Zionists,” he said.
Censure is a formal statement of disapproval in the form of a resolution that is adopted by majority vote. It does not hold any more power than publicly condemning the member's actions.
Township attorney Derk Beckerleg opened the meeting by stating that Fakih’s remarks did not legally qualify as a hate crime or ethnic intimidation, and therefore the board had no authority to remove her, according to a report from Deadline Detroit.
Fakih’s comments were made on Oct. 4 as the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel approached. In the year since, Israel has been at war with Hamas and, more recently, Hezbollah.
While speaking Monday night, Fakih, a Lebanese American, didn’t back down or apologize for her post, but instead “justified her comments” by explaining her anger and hurt over the war in the Middle East, according to Deadline Detroit.
"For the last week you have seen some members of this board give statements and comments to the press," she said, according to the report. "In those statements and in those comments they have put words in my mouth, and they have labeled me antisemitic."
"I made a comment about Zionism. And what I want to be clear about is that a danger that we're seeing in society today is trying to redefine and broaden the definition of words. The problem with doing that, similar to labeling, is that it shuts down discourse. And sometimes often needed dialogue,” she said, per Deadline Detroit. "And in the last year, in support of this ideology we have watched, for retribution for Oct. 7, we have watched the attacks on Gaza, we have seen 60 percent of infrastructure in Gaza obliterated, reduced to rubble. And countless, countless number of deaths, and in part they're countless because there are still bodies under the rubble."