Political Activists Are Erasing September 11 in K-12 Education

Like every American over 30—and I am well over 30—the events of September 11, 2001 will forever be ingrained in my memory. From my office window in Washington that day, I watched smoke rising from the Pentagon. I wondered who I knew who might have been killed in the Twin Towers. I felt the terrible uncertainty that descended upon the entire country.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered. They were Americans and citizens of scores of other countries. September 11 was not specifically a Jewish tragedy, but it was also a Jewish tragedy. Hundreds of Jews—perhaps as many as 400—were among the dead.

For many Americans, the attacks brought home the danger of a terrorist ideology that had taken root in the Middle East. Israelis already knew that danger intimately. For decades, they had endured bombings, hijackings and massacres carried out in the name of extremist political and religious doctrines. Most American Jews therefore understood that September 11 was not simply a random act of violence but an attack on a free society by an Islamist movement that regarded democracy, pluralism and Western civilization—and Jews in particular—as enemies.

Yet now there are efforts in public school curricula to invert the meaning of September 11, deflecting attention away from radical Islam and toward America’s supposed shortcomings.  And American Jews should take it just as seriously as an ideological assault on the Jewish community.   

Consider “Teaching Beyond September 11th,” a high-school and college curriculum developed by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and promoted by New York City Public Schools, several state education agencies, professional associations, and advocacy groups.

A review by the North American Values Institute found that the curriculum devotes surprisingly little attention to the attacks themselves. It says the United States “accused” Osama bin Laden of masterminding 9/11, language that makes al-Qaeda’s responsibility sound like a disputed American claim rather than an established fact. It likewise portrays bin Laden as simply “living in Afghanistan,” with no meaningful explanation of the Taliban’s protection of al-Qaeda or the terrorist training infrastructure the organization maintained there.

Even more conspicuous is the curriculum’s failure to grapple seriously with al-Qaeda’s Islamist ideology—the worldview that inspired the murder of nearly 3,000 people. Its attention is directed instead toward Islamophobia, American racism, government surveillance, right-wing extremism, and American misconduct in Afghanistan.

None of those subjects should be off-limits. Anti-Muslim prejudice, threats to civil liberties, and the consequences of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq all deserve thoughtful examination. But they should not displace an honest account of who carried out the attacks, what motivated them, and why they occurred.

A curriculum purportedly about September 11 should not, however, devote extensive attention to America’s alleged faults while barely explaining the beliefs and objectives of the people who committed mass murder.

The curriculum reflects the perspectives of the activists who helped create it. Its project director, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, is a professor at Penn whose work focuses on anti-Muslim racism and “challenging dominant perspectives.” Collaborator Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu is executive director of CAIR-Philadelphia, an organization that has advised teachers to avoid terms such as “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists,” and “radical Islamic terrorists”—even when discussing al-Qaeda. 

Sawsan Jaber, an educator and activist who co-authored a unit on “Muslim Youth and Resistance,” has worked with American Muslims for Palestine and publicly mourned Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 massacre. Another collaborator, the Building Movement Project, openly promotes progressive movement-building and anti-Zionist advocacy.

The curriculum even presents Linda Sarsour as a model of progressive Muslim womanhood without acknowledging her declaration that Zionists cannot be feminists, or her open hostility to Israel.

This is not conventional 9/11 denial. It does not claim that the planes never struck the buildings. It is something subtler: narrative erasure and moral reassignment. The perpetrators recede into the background, their ideology disappears, and America gradually becomes the principal wrongdoer in a story that began with an unprovoked murderous rampage against Americans.

The consequences extend beyond historical accuracy. Students taught to see Islamist terrorism chiefly as a legitimate response to American oppression will be ill-equipped to understand Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s proxies, or the continuing threat posed by jihadist organizations. Jewish students are also being asked to absorb a worldview in which hostility toward Israel and Zionism is uncontested while the ideology driving violence against Jews is barely noted.

This same moral inversion was applied by left-wing and Islamist activists to October 7—only much more quickly. September 11 took longer because Americans had experienced the attacks firsthand and were not yet prepared to forget what they had witnessed.

That parallel should remind the American Jewish community that the intellectual assault on America and the West must be taken just as seriously as the assault on Jews and Zionism. The underlying logic is the same, and many of the same people are spreading both sets of falsehoods. Allowing one narrative to go unchallenged only strengthens the other.

Islamist terrorism remains a threat to the United States, the West, and the Jewish people. We cannot allow the history of September 11 to be twisted into an indictment of the society that was attacked or transformed into political instruction that absolves the ideology responsible for mass murder.

David Bernstein is the CEO of the North American Values Institute (NAVI)