A nonprofit is distributing 9/11 lesson plans to school districts across the country that completely omit the names Osama bin Laden and the group behind the attacks.
The 9:57 Project’s 94-page curriculum doesn’t mention Islam. It doesn’t name Bin Laden. It doesn’t say the words describing who actually carried out the September 11 attacks.
The organization has worked with districts in Virginia, Kentucky, and beyond — turning the deadliest attack on American soil into a revisionist history lesson that erases the attackers entirely.
“The commemoration of 9/11 focuses on those whose lives were lost and those who sacrificed to help others – not those who attacked the United States.”
That’s the actual guidance from Fairfax County, Virginia’s public school system, whose 9/11 lesson plan drew national outrage when Fox News revealed its first section was titled “Responding to Racism, Hate, and Bias against Muslims and Middle Eastern People.”
The curriculum instructed teachers to “leverage a critical lens with students” — code for critical race theory.
Fairfax schools superintendent Michelle Reid blamed the materials on “authoritative subject-matter resources, including materials from the 9:57 Project, which is an association with the mission to connect Veterans with students to perpetuate service, teamwork, and the legacy of Flight 93.”
The 9:57 Project claims it “provides six lessons on 9/11 and its effects.” Instead of naming who attacked America, the curriculum focuses on human interest stories and the hardships of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed.
The curriculum mentions the group behind the attacks exactly once — in passing, saying a U.S. service member was missed by his family because he was “fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan against” them.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said on social media the Fairfax approach would “be like trying to teach Pearl Harbor and leaving out the fact that we were attacked by the Japanese Empire. It’s that absurd.”
The erasure has been so thorough that when PragerU asked college students who attacked America on 9/11, many didn’t know. One student, visibly uncomfortable, said “I don’t want to sound retarded” before guessing “Israel?”
The 9:57 Project was founded by Peter Findler, an administrator at the Wakefield School in The Plains, Virginia, and John Hamilton, an Army veteran. It is advised by women from leftist private schools. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.
School board member Mateo Dunne, whose constituents include residents of Fort Belvoir, told The Daily Wire he was outraged that Fairfax County Public Schools “directed educators and schools to teach our children that 9/11 was about ‘Racism, Hate, and Bias against Muslims and Middle Eastern People.'”
“This is a gross mischaracterization of our history that resembles the worst propaganda propagated by our foreign adversaries.”
Fairfax instructed teachers not to “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists,” and to instead “create safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students.”
The reason some Fairfax students might be offended by hearing the names of those who committed 9/11 has a darker explanation: some of their families are, in fact, tied to the groups involved.
Some of the hijackers attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Fairfax County, whose imam was Anwar al-Awlaki — later confirmed as an operative who traveled to Yemen, where former President Barack Obama had him targeted. Al-Awlaki was hired by mosque director Esam Omeish, whose daughter Abrar Omeish later joined the school board.
Just before the 20th anniversary of September 11, Abrar opposed a motion to honor the victims of 9/11, instead offering a resolution that spent one paragraph on dead Americans and ten paragraphs treating Muslims as the victims.
At a school graduation that year, Omeish declined to put her hand over her heart for the pledge of allegiance and gave a speech telling graduates to remember their “jihad” as they entered a world of “white supremacy.”
Fairfax County receives extra federal dollars for educating the children of military members. Yet in 2022, an FCPS curriculum called “Identifying Your Privilege” listed “Military Kids” as privileged alongside “Cisgenders” and “Native English Speakers.”
The same school system’s lessons on slavery do not omit the race of people who owned slaves, or suggest their descendants hundreds of years later have nothing to do with it.
Only one of 12 Fairfax school board members objected to the 9/11 curriculum — despite the county being home to many military families and sitting just miles from the Pentagon.
It would be like trying to teach Pearl Harbor and leaving out that we were attacked by the Japanese Empire. It’s that absurd….. https://t.co/BXA7k1LOXk
— Jason Miyares (@JasonMiyaresVA) September 11, 2026
