Two-thirds of American college students cannot identify who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, or why they did it.
That shocking finding comes from Middle East studies professors surveyed by the New York Post ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks that murdered nearly three thousand people on American soil.
The reason? A generation of woke school curricula has replaced factual teaching about the al Qaeda terrorist attacks with blame-the-victim propaganda.
“SOME PEOPLE DID SOMETHING” — CONGRESSWOMAN ILHAN OMAR’S ERASURE OF THE ISLAMIST ENEMY THAT ATTACKED AMERICA
Instead of naming the Islamist terrorists who hijacked planes and flew them into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, students are being taught that the attacks were a “response” to U.S. support for Israel, the Persian Gulf War, and American military presence in the Middle East.
A New Jersey curriculum produced with CAIR-NJ and “Teaching While Muslim” has told students exactly that — reframing a terrorist massacre as a policy disagreement.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar reduced the attacks to “some people did something.”
Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11.”
According to the Post, the lack of mandatory teaching standards about the terrorist attack has allowed woke ideology blaming the attacks on U.S. policy or “Islamophobia” to be taught instead. Some of these lesson plans have been funded by far-left billionaire George Soros.
This is not teaching history. It is a radical woke attempt to rewrite history and explain away murder.
The al Qaeda terrorists did not hijack those planes because of political differences with the U.S. They did it because they despised the civilization those towers represented: democracy, mixed societies, individual liberty, women in public life, Jews and Christians, and secular people living without clerical veto.
Al Qaeda’s leaders said so. Their documents said so. Their sermons said so.
The Texas Board of Education recently sparked controversy when it approved changes to the state’s high school social studies curriculum that say radical Islam motivated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That should not be controversial. It is historical fact.
THE SAME EXCUSE-MAKING SHOWS UP EVERY TIME ISLAMIST ATTACKS OCCUR — LONDON 2005, PARIS 2015, BRUSSELS 2016, HAMAS ON OCTOBER 7, 2023
The same instinct — to explain away Islamist violence as a response to policy differences rather than an expression of extremist ideology — shows up every time such terrorist attacks occur.
London in 2005. Madrid in 2004. Paris in 2015. Brussels in 2016. Bali in 2002 and 2005. Mumbai in 2006 and 2008. The 2017 siege of Marawi in the Philippines.
These attacks can’t be linked to differences with the U.S. or the American military presence in the Middle East. They were assaults on democracy, freedom, and modern society.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre against Israel also belongs on that list. Hamas murdered about 1,200 people — including babies, children, and the elderly — burned homes, took hostages, and filmed their murderous work.
Hamas did not raid Israeli communities over a zoning dispute. It attacked because its ideology cannot tolerate a free, neighboring society that it cannot defeat except by terror.
Some details differ from 9/11. The civilizational contempt does not.
The morning of September 11, 2001, belongs first to the victims and family members of this massacre. It belongs to the heroic firefighters and police officers who ran toward the fire and climbed stairs while others fled.
It belongs to the brave passengers on Flight 93 who understood they were already dead and chose to fight anyway. It belongs to office workers who carried strangers down darkened stairwells.
These were acts of duty and patriotism under conditions designed to produce panic. Their sacrifice deserves a sober memory, not an effort to minimize this atrocity.
The killers were Muslim fanatics who rejected the modern world. That is not an indictment of every Muslim. The vast majority reject that fanaticism and have often been its victims.
We are seeing a version of this Islamist fanaticism now in Iran, where the IRGC and the ruling mullahs are executing protesters and people who talk to the Western media.
A regime that hangs its own people for demanding a normal life is not resisting some vague threat from the U.S. or Israel. It is at war with modernity itself.
Good deeds are not enough. Name who did this. State why. And say, without embarrassment: never again.
