Sammamish Official Resigns After Anti-LGBT Comments During Public Meeting

A member of the council for the city of Sammamish, Washington, resigned on June 5, after making comments critical of Pride month and the LGBTQ+ community during a planning meeting on June 1.

During the Planning Commission meeting, member Wassim Fayed asserted that members of the LGBTQ+ community were “promoting diseases and infestation into the minds of our kids in schools.”

“God created us as a male and a female, and to go against the creation of God and to spread diseases in the community is something that we should speak up against," he said.

On Monday afternoon, the City of Sammamish condemned Fayed’s comments.

“Shortly after this statement was sent out, Fayed offered his resignation to the mayor, which the mayor accepted. The resignation was effective immediately,” the city said in a statement. Credit: City of Sammamish via Storyful

Video transcript

- Would you like to--

- Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate that I'm given the time to speak about this topic.

So what I'm going to say might not gel well with some people, but I want to be honest. I want to come up front with my belief and what I want to say. And hopefully, I don't want-- I'm not trying to insult anybody or trying to, you know, praise anybody. But it's feedback based on the conversation that we had with regard to the training that we had with regard to diversity.

So as my background as a Muslim person, it is my duty and my belief to speak or to promote goodness and when I see certain things that are not appropriate and not right, at least speak about it, right? Everybody has the right to speak about and, you know, say something. When you see certain things are going in the right direction, say something good about it. If something is going in the wrong direction, it's good for people to speak about it and to provide their opinion.

So one of the key things that I go by in my life is a verse from the Quran that I would like to recite right now, which says, [SPEAKING ARABIC]

So this verse in the Quran says, all mankind, all people-- it is not all Muslims or all Christians or Jews or all men or all women, all mankind, all mankind. "Verily we have created you from a male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you get to know each other," not so that you spite each other and hate each other and fight. So you get to know each other. So part of the creation is that we are here to get to know each other, to learn from each other, which is really a good thing.

So one of the things that I learned from the presentation-- and it was an eye opener for me because, in my background, where I come from, we don't have these discrepancies between, you know, people of different colors, different race, different backgrounds. So-- and it was, you know-- it clicked to me to see how people were disenfranchised with regard to their color, and then they were deprived from-- they were created this way. They were created-- they look this way.

Like for example, one time I was invited in Florida to give a speech at the Friday sermon at a prison with the chaplain of that-- it was a federal maximum security prison. So I went in, and I gave the Friday sermon, the Friday speech.

And when I finished, there were also people who are not Muslim who attended the speech. They wanted to hear what we're talking about. And I got one of the best comments from one of the inmates.

He came to me-- and he was an older Black person. He came to me. He says, "When I look at you, I see a Black person. I don't see a white person."

This is how close he felt, you know, when we-- we need to embrace each other. And specifically, people we created certain ways. But then to club certain people who choose a certain lifestyle and say they are among the minority, I don't believe that is the right thing. And I'm going to be very specific, the LGBT community, and specifically creating a Pride month for them.

These are some of the most wealthy, the most connected people. I had a person who reported to me at Microsoft. He left Microsoft for a job to be an activist in that community that pays double what he was making at Microsoft. So these are not a minority people who are disenfranchised that we need to club as part of the minority people.

So in my opinion, these are people that are promoting diseases and infestation into the mind of our kids in schools. So we as a community, we should stand up for this, and that's my belief, and that's where I come from.

I don't believe this is the right way of life. God created us a male and a female. And to go and go against the creation of God and to spread diseases in the community is something that we should speak up against. Or at least, I would like to speak up against because that goes against my belief.

So that's what I would like to share. I believe in diversity. This is my life.

I believe-- I love the diverse community in Sammamish. But if someone wants to choose a lifestyle, that's to themselves. They decide on themselves. They do it privately. That's theirs.

But to go and make it a thing to promote this and every movie and every TV show everywhere, teaching our kids and poisoning our kids with this, I don't believe this is the right thing to do. So I appreciate the time that I was given, and I wanted to share my opinion on this as part of the training. I don't believe that LGBT should be part of the minority.