They’re teaching everything about 9/11 except who did it and why

“Some people did something.” That was Rep. Ilan Omar’s (D-MN) description of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York, at the Pentagon, and in western Pennsylvania.The approach taken by one of America’s biggest public school systems is similar. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the terrorist murders of nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, Fairfax County Public Schools in northern Virginia cautioned teachers to avoid propagating hate by discussing the Islamist motivation of the airliner hijackers.In 1984, George Orwell’s classic of totalitarian thought control, protagonist Winston Smith spends his dismal days at the Ministry of Truth, casting facts inconvenient to Big Brother down the memory hole. The most active ideological trend in contemporary Islam, a political-religious melding of Nazi propaganda with a revived and puritanical Islamic imperialism, has murdered several hundred thousand people worldwide. With regard to it, FCPS operates not a memory hole but a memory sieve. The central office reminded teachers, “We recognize the challenges that this important anniversary presents to students, families, and staff. Many FCPS families and staff were personally impacted by 9/11 and the United States War on Terror. Many families of military personnel and first responders experienced loss and hardship.”But the ideology and actions of the al Qaeda perpetrators “should not be attributed to Islam or to Muslims as a religious community.” Of course not. But there is no acknowledgment that adherents of Islamic fundamentalism after 9/11 have murdered another 120-plus Americans in attacks including those at Fort Hood in 2009, a California federal office building in 2015, and a Florida nightclub in 2016. No mention of investigations by joint FBI-local task forces that put hundreds of would-be 9/11 imitators behind bars. No nod to the billions of dollars spent on everything from airport monitoring to the Department of Homeland Security. Through the memory sieve go specifics about who might want to kill us and why.Retained are seven single-spaced pages of pedagogical misdirection. They include: “Many of our Muslim families worry about sending their children to school each September 11 because of increased incidents of harassment, violence, and hate crimes experienced by Muslim Americans.”Federal uniform hate crime statistics do not support claims of a significant increase in anti-Muslim actions. From 2018 through 2022, the primary targets of bias crimes in schools, for example, were, in order, blacks, Jews, and LGBT people. But allegations of surging “Islamophobic incidents” do come from groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.The CAIR describes itself as the biggest U.S. Muslim civil rights organization. But the council was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest federal terrorism funding trial to date, the 2008 Holy Land Relief and Development case. Five men, including a co-founder of the CAIR’s Texas chapter, received prison sentences for laundering $12 million for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is the U.S. government-designated terrorist organization that massacred nearly 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 others in 2023.It also is the Palestinian spin-off the Muslim Brotherhood, mothership of al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and other Islamist terrorist organizations. It was at a CAIR meeting that Omar referred to the “people who did something.”But cowed by a CAIR lawsuit over disciplining Muslim Student Association members for violating FPCS rules, the system warned teachers that “many of our students may feel anxious or confused when encountering details and images [of 9/11] in the media or in their conversations inside and outside the classroom.” Lest facts intrude and cause confusion and anxiety, staff should remember it “is committed to equitably supporting students as they navigate the challenging issues of our world.” And also to “create and sustain inclusive, affirming learning communities that honor students’ social-emotional needs and reject racism, hate, and bias.”‘TERRORISM IS DEFENSE’: THE SHOCKING SPEECHES DELIVERED INSIDE UN HEADQUARTERSBy all means, “navigate.” Affirm social-emotional needs. Just don’t educate.Taxpayers provide FCPS $4 billion annually to instruct approximately 180,000 pupils. Numerous administrators pocket hefty six-figure salaries, in part presumably to provide students with a factual basis for citizenship. Except, it seems, when that might cause someone at FCPS confusion and anxiety about Islamic extremism.Eric Rozenman retired in 2024 as communications consultant for the Washington-based Jewish Policy Center. He is an author, most recently of The David Discovery, a Novel of the Near Future, among other works.