Friday marks 25 years since 19 terrorists hijacked four planes and murdered 2,977 people on American soil. In the wake of those attacks, this country made itself one promise: Never Forget.
Twenty-five years later, it's clear some people are working hard to make sure we do exactly that: forget.
Here's the number that should make every American furious: only Arizona and Florida legally require public schools to teach about the September 11 attacks. Ten states have statutes that merely encourage some form of 9/11 instruction, according to an August University of Wisconsin study, and that can mean anything from a moment of silence to a full lesson. New York, where the towers actually fell, mandates only a moment of silence and a passing mention in Board of Regents standards. No statewide curriculum exists.
Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who is pushing legislation to require 9/11 education in all 50 states, told the New York Post, "We made a promise to 'Never Forget', but today, only a handful of states require 9/11 to be taught in their schools."
But it gets worse. So much worse.
According to the North America Values Institute, an education watchdog group, leftist activists, some backed by George Soros, have produced 9/11 lesson plans now used in schools nationwide, including in New York City. One, "Teaching Beyond September 11th," spends exactly one paragraph on the actual attacks and never once calls the hijackers terrorists, instead building entire units around "Right-Wing Extremism" and "Islamophobia and the Oval Office." It describes Osama bin Laden only as a man the United States "accused" of masterminding the attacks, leaving out his own confessions and his declared jihad against a country he called the "worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind."
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The curriculum was developed by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education beginning in 2019 and is now recommended by education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, said this kind of material teaches kids "that America is responsible for the atrocities around the world to develop a moral framework that can be activated very quickly to get policies that reduce America's power and sovereignty." She said the tactic mirrors what the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps use to target young people. "Ayatollah Khamenei said the best audience to target is students," she added.
It still gets worse.
Adam Feinberg, a teacher at Brooklyn's City Polytechnic High School, assigns ninth through 12th graders Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" alongside a worksheet asking them, without a hint of irony, "Why do you think Osama bin Laden hates Jews so much?" He uploaded it to the American Federation of Teachers' own lesson-sharing portal back in 2020. He never denied writing it.
None of these curricula bother to mention that nearly 10,000 first responders and civilians have since died from illnesses tied to Ground Zero toxins, or what any of this does to the families left behind. Gail Silke's brother, NYPD officer Stephen Driscoll, 38, died in the South Tower. She didn't hold back: "They're not affected by it, they're not in our shoes, and they don't want to be in our shoes. Those people can kiss my a*s." A Manhattan mother whose father-in-law died on 9/11 said, "They were disgusted with the [expletive] they were taught, it's not fair, they lost their grandfather."
New York state Assemblyman Matt Slater (R-N.Y.) said, "Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by al Qaeda on September 11th. They were the victims. The terrorists were the perpetrators. Any curriculum that blurs that fundamental truth, or makes the victims secondary to a political narrative, isn't teaching history, it's rewriting it."
When Soros-linked groups are writing lesson plans that soft-pedal the hijackers and focus on "Islamophobia" instead, we have a problem. The left is so devoted to its woke ideology that it is trying to rewrite the history of 9/11.
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