Teaching Jihad within the American Classroom: New Guide Fails to Call 9/11 Perpetrators Terrorists * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim advocacy organization in the United States, released a 2026–2027 Back-to-School Resource Guide for K–12 schools this week. The 16-page document recommended that high school students read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

The guide, distributed nationally by CAIR’s headquarters as part of what the organization calls its “Unhostile Campus Campaign,” addressed “the rise in hate crimes and discrimination against American Muslim and perceived-Muslim communities.” It also contains material related to Gaza, which in no way addresses the terrorism committed by Muslim extremists on 9/11.

A companion curriculum titled “The Impact of 9/11 on Muslims” was produced jointly by CAIR-NJ and a group called Teaching While Muslim. Once again, the curriculum is concerned with the fact that many Americans tended to dislike Muslims after the single worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil and one of the worst of the past century.

It reads, “While Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism existed long before the 9/11 attacks, this time period marked a stark shift in US policy and state-sponsored Islamophobia in the US and abroad.”

A phobia, by definition, is an irrational fear. But fear of Islamic extremism is rational. Both documents failed to address the recurring pattern of Islamist attacks on U.S. soil, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (Ramzi Yousef and co-conspirators).

This was followed by the 9/11 attacks (al-Qaeda, 19 hijackers), the 2002 LAX El Al ticket-counter shooting (Hesham Mohamed Hadayet), the 2009 Fort Hood shooting (Nidal Hasan), the 2009 Little Rock recruiting-center shooting (Abdulhakim Muhammad), and the 2010 Times Square bombing attempt (Faisal Shahzad).

The pattern continued with the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing (Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), the 2014 Oklahoma workplace beheading (Alton Nolen), the 2015 Garland “Muhammad Art Exhibit” attack (Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi), the 2015 Chattanooga recruiting-center shootings (Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez), and the 2015 San Bernardino attack (Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik).

These were followed by the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting (Omar Mateen), the 2016 Chelsea/NYC and New Jersey bombings (Ahmad Khan Rahimi), the 2016 Ohio State University car-and-knife attack (Abdul Razak Ali Artan), the 2017 NYC bike-path truck attack (Sayfullo Saipov), and the 2017 Port Authority NYC subway bombing attempt (Akayed Ullah).

More recently, the United States experienced the 2019 Naval Air Station Pensacola shooting (Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani), the 2025 New Orleans Bourbon Street truck attack (Shamsud-Din Jabbar), and the 2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting (Rahmanullah Lakanwal).

The pattern continued in 2026 with the Mint Hill, North Carolina, New Year’s Eve plot (Christian Sturdivant), the Gracie Mansion bombing attempt (two men from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, unnamed in current reporting), and the NYC Jewish center plot (Muhammad Khan).

The curriculum, “The Impact of 9/11 on Muslims,” told students, “There was immediate backlash against anyone perceived to be Muslim which was either the extreme stereotypical portrayal of Muslims as Arab, bearded, and with a turban, or Muslim women who wore hijabs.”

It is not exactly a stereotype to suggest that Arab men have beards and Muslim women wear hijabs, since the Hadith require Muslim men to have beards and the Quran requires women to wear hijabs.

The booklet then discusses “hate crimes” against Muslims, including the destruction of mosques, something that is statistically uncommon. It then states, “For example, the US government passed the Patriot Act which gave the government full authority to surveil Muslims and infringe on their unalienable rights.”

This is a lie. There is nothing in the Patriot Act that specifically states that Muslims will or should be surveilled.

The words “terror” and “terrorist” appear at least 32 times in the document but are never applied to the Islamic extremists who killed innocent civilians. Designed for use in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, the curriculum instead describes the men who hijacked four commercial airliners and killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, as a “group self-identifying as Al Qaeda hailing from the mountains of Afghanistan.”

Bin Laden himself is introduced to students simply as “a man named Osama bin Laden,” an anti-Soviet fighter the United States once supported during the 1980s, a biographical detail lifted from the Cold War and presented without the three decades of terrorism that followed it.

For high school reading, the curriculum recommends the full text of bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” the 2002 manifesto in which the al-Qaeda leader laid out his justification for mass murder. In that document, bin Laden wrote that “the Jews… control your policies, media and economy,” a claim that sits uncomfortably close to the antisemitic conspiracy theories CAIR’s own materials elsewhere claim to oppose.

The curriculum also tells students that the 9/11 hijackers “launched the attacks in response to America’s support of Israel, their involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and the vast presence of the US military in the Middle East,” listing support for Israel first among the stated grievances.

The guide describes the U.S. War on Terror by stating, “The US declared a ‘Global War on Terrorism’ that they used to justify invading and attacking Iraq.” It then cites an alleged figure of 800,000 civilians killed in the War on Terror.

First, because terrorists do not wear uniforms, the killing of terrorists is often framed as civilian deaths. Second, the book never mentions the 33,000 people killed by ISIS, the thousands killed by al-Qaeda, or the tens of thousands killed by Boko Haram, ISWAP, Fulani, and other groups in Africa.

The 800,000 figure, sometimes reported as 940,000, is a made-up statistic. CAIR’s curriculum implies that these were civilian deaths and, further, wrongful deaths caused by the United States. In fact, the figure represents the total number of deaths related to terrorism and counterterrorism during that period.

The count covers everyone killed in the post-9/11 wars on every side: U.S. and allied military personnel killed in combat; opposing combatants, including Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other insurgent or militant fighters killed by U.S., coalition, and partner-nation forces; and partner-nation security forces, including Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Yemeni, and Pakistani military and police personnel killed while fighting terrorists.

It also includes contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers, and civilians. Those civilians were killed both by terrorists through bombings, massacres, and sectarian violence and by U.S., coalition, and government forces through airstrikes, ground operations, and crossfire.

The link to the curriculum was removed from CAIR’s national guide a day after it was first flagged, though screenshots preserved by Jewish Onliner, which broke the story, document its original contents.

CAIR describes itself as a nonprofit “grassroots civil rights and advocacy organization.” Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has roughly 28 affiliate chapters nationwide, including CAIR-NJ. Its stated mission is to protect civil rights, promote justice, and counter discrimination against American Muslims.

However, CAIR was founded by former officers of the Islamic Association for Palestine, and federal prosecutors named it an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in U.S. history. In that case, the foundation was found to have funneled money to Hamas. CAIR itself has never been criminally charged in connection with the case.

The organization’s terrorism ties have drawn formal government action on multiple fronts. The United Arab Emirates designated CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014. More recently, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared CAIR a “foreign terrorist organization” and “transnational criminal organization” by proclamation on November 18, 2025. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed with a nearly identical executive order on December 9, 2025.

Both orders impose state-level consequences, including restrictions on land sales in Texas and the denial of government contracts and employment in Florida. However, neither carries federal legal force, and CAIR’s chapters in both states have sued, calling the designations unconstitutional and defamatory.

At the federal level, no such designation currently exists. Rep. Randy Fine introduced legislation in June 2025 directing the State Department to investigate designating CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization. A companion bill, the “Designate CAIR as a Terrorist Organization Act” (H.R. 4097), remains pending before the 119th Congress. Neither has become law.

In September 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton warned Education Secretary Linda McMahon about CAIR’s efforts to gain influence in K–12 schools, writing that “such an organization should never have access to our nation’s children.”

House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., told Jewish Onliner that “credible reports that CAIR is partnering with K–12 schools to push a radical curriculum are deeply troubling given CAIR’s ties to terrorism and antisemitism.”