The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

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Fairfax schools tell teachers what NOT to link to 9/11: Islam and Muslims

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BS BULLETIN:

  • Fairfax County Public Schools’ 9/11 guidance tells teachers not to “associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims” or “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists.”
  • Teachers are instructed to create safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students and to “disrupt” Islamophobic rhetoric.
  • A retired vice admiral who was inside the Pentagon during the attack says students should learn about the Islamist extremism that motivated al-Qaeda without blaming ordinary Muslims.

Twenty-five years after Islamic extremists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, Fairfax County Public Schools has some very specific advice for teachers discussing the attacks.

Don’t associate 9/11 with Islam or Muslims. Don’t “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists.” And if you encounter what the district calls “Islamophobic rhetoric,” teachers are told, “it is up to you to disrupt.”

Those instructions appear in a six-page FCPS guide for educators commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to documents obtained and published by Fox News Digital.

The Northern Virginia school district — located just miles from the Pentagon — says the goal is to prevent Muslim students from being blamed or harassed over terrorism committed by extremists.

The guide instructs teachers to “intentionally include Muslim Americans among the heroes, helpers, and victims” and to challenge associations between being Muslim, an outsider, and a terrorist. It also warns educators that Muslim students can experience heightened anti-Muslim hostility surrounding annual 9/11 commemorations.

But critics say the district has gone so far in trying to prevent prejudice that it risks sanitizing the history students are supposed to be learning. Fox reported that the six-page guide contains roughly 30 references to Islam, Muslims, anti-Muslim racism, Islamophobia and Middle Eastern students or families. Military families are mentioned three times and first responders once, according to the outlet’s review.

Retired Vice Adm. Lou Crenshaw knows something about what happened that morning. He was inside the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building.

Crenshaw criticized the FCPS approach as too “vanilla,” arguing that students need to understand that al-Qaeda was a religious extremist organization that used an extremist interpretation of Islam to justify its violence. At the same time, Crenshaw explicitly cautioned against blaming mainstream Muslims for the terrorists’ ideology.

That distinction is at the center of the controversy.

Teaching students that the 19 hijackers were al-Qaeda terrorists motivated by Islamist extremism does not require teaching children that Muslims generally were responsible for 9/11. But critics argue that leaving the attackers and their ideology on the sidelines leaves students without a basic explanation of why the attacks occurred.

Fairfax County, meanwhile, says its commemorative focus should be on the victims and those who sacrificed to help others rather than the terrorists.

The district’s public 25th-anniversary message similarly emphasizes “the loss of life, the heroism of our first responders, and the resilience of our country,” while encouraging students to participate in service activities for Patriot Day.

The controversy comes as schools nationwide wrestle with how to teach an event increasingly outside students’ living memory. At least 40 states now require or encourage some form of 9/11 education, according to an Associated Press review, but what children actually learn varies dramatically from state to state.

MY QUICK TAKE

Here’s a radical teaching concept:

Tell them what happened. Tell them who did it. Tell them why they did it. And tell them that the terrorists don’t represent every Muslim on Earth.

See? We managed all four sentences without traumatizing anybody or rewriting history.

Twenty-five years later, 9/11 shouldn’t require an instruction manual explaining which parts of 9/11 teachers shouldn’t talk about.

DBS WIRE SOURCES

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