Fairfax County School District in Virginia is reportedly trying to downplay the role radical Islam played in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This comes as the nation commemorates the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people.
The district is instructing its teachers not to connect the attacks with radical Islam and to foster “safe spaces” for Muslim students.
From Fox News:
The guardrails in a six-page instructional guide, "25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11" and distributed to teachers, has prompted critics to accuse Fairfax County (Virginia) Public School's liberal leaders of coddling post-9/11 sensitivities rather than teaching history.
"It's sort of a vanilla way to do things," retired Navy Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw, who was stationed inside the Pentagon when al Qaeda terrorists crashed a hijacked passenger jet into the building. "Everybody can go through the deal and feel good about it. And at the end of the day, nobody complains.
"To me, that's not exactly what we need to do. We need to make sure that the kids have learned a lesson here. And that's not going to happen if we try to shave the facts to the point where it's hard to figure out what we're talking about."
A digital content analysis reveals that about half of the 1,740-word document is devoted to tips for creating "safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students," about 15% spells out specific 9/11 instruction and the rest of the document tip-toes around managing "emotional responses" to the lesson.
The guide by the school district, which sits only a few miles from the Pentagon and several military bases, mentions military families only three times and first responders only once, saying at one point, "Many families of military personnel and first responders experienced loss and hardship."
Meanwhile, it has 30 references to Islam, "Muslim families," "Muslim students," "anti-Muslim racism," "anti-Middle Eastern" rhetoric, "Islamophobic rhetoric" and "Middle Eastern students" and families. It includes a bulleted list of "critical considerations" to challenge anti-Muslim bias.
The guide also features a section telling educators that Muslim students deal with “the worst anti-Muslim racism” during lessons about the terrorist attack. If a teacher or student hears others using “Islamophobic rhetoric,” then it is “up to you to disrupt,” the guide says.
Under a list of "Do" and "Don’t" instructions, FCPS explicitly tells teachers don't "associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims" and don't "center the extremists or the acts of the extremists."
The guide says the commemoration should focus on "those whose lives were lost and those who sacrificed to help others – not those who attacked the United States."
Crenshaw explained that 9/11 was carried out by a terrorist group “who did not tolerate what the United States was doing around the world and decided to react violently.”
He argued that educators should tell students the truth behind radical Islam’s role in motivating the attack without blaming all Muslims. He noted that al-Qaeda represents “a branch of Islam, but they certainly to not espouse any of the values that we know of Islam worldwide,” meaning “they really shouldn’t be considered to be part of that mainstream religion.”
The numbers appear to bear out Crenshaw’s statements. A 2017 Pew Research poll revealed that 76 percent of Muslim Americans said that “targeting and killing civilians… to further a political, social or religious cause” was never justified.
In an attempt to gauge views about violence against civilians – not only among Muslims, but also among Americans overall – Pew Research Center asked a new question in this survey. The survey asked whether “targeting and killing civilians can be justified in order to further a political, social or religious cause.”
Although both Muslim Americans and the U.S. public as a whole overwhelmingly reject violence against civilians, Muslims are more likely to say such actions can never be justified. Three-quarters of U.S. Muslims (76%) say this, compared with 59% of the general public. Similar shares of Muslims (12%) and all U.S. adults (14%) say targeting and killing civilians can “often” or “sometimes” be justified.