US Muslim Brotherhood Group Publishes 9/11 Anniversary Teaching Guide; Advocates No Mention Of Attackers’ Ideology

Short­ly before the 20^th anniver­sary of the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks, the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) pub­lished a guide pro­vid­ing teach­ers with edu­ca­tion­al resources and tips that almost exclu­sive­ly high­light the attack’s impact on Amer­i­can Mus­lims while urg­ing no men­tion be made of the attack­ers’ Islamist ide­ol­o­gy. Accord­ing to the guide, titled “Remem­ber­ing and Reflect­ing Teach­ing Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 in Diverse Classrooms”:

August 23, 2021 Although most schools teach stu­dents about 9/11 in an appro­pri­ate way, our civ­il rights orga­ni­za­tion usu­al­ly receives a spike in com­plaints from stu­dents and fam­i­lies on anniver­saries of 9/11. […] With this in mind, we write to share infor­ma­tive resources that your school dis­trict can use to ensure that your les­son plans about the 9/11 attacks are accu­rate and reli­ably sourced, pro­tect Mus­lim stu­dents from bul­ly­ing, and edu­cate stu­dents about the impact that 9/11 had on all Amer­i­cans, includ­ing Amer­i­can Muslims.

Read the rest here.

The CAIR guide was designed for grades 6–12 and includes a list of gen­er­al les­son plans about 9/11 and doc­u­men­taries, news reports, and arti­cles cov­er­ing the attacks and their impact on Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can Mus­lims. CAIR also pro­vides a list of rec­om­mend­ed tips to help ensure that inci­dents of big­otry are avoid­ed dur­ing class­room dis­cus­sions of 9/11. To that end, CAIR states teach­ers should refrain from using lan­guage that “val­i­dates the claims of the 9/11 attack­ers” by asso­ci­at­ing their acts of mass mur­der with Islam and Mus­lims. Teach­ers are also advised to avoid using terms such as “Islam­ic ter­ror­ists,” “jihadists,” or “rad­i­cal Islam­ic ter­ror­ists,” which CAIR describes as “inac­cu­rate and inflammatory.”

In late August 2021, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that CAIR had pub­lished a 17-page “Journalist’s Guide to Report­ing on Islam and Mus­lims,” pur­port­ed­ly designed to give jour­nal­ists and oth­er media pro­fes­sion­als the tools to gain a “bet­ter under­stand­ing of Islam,” in which it used mis­lead­ing lan­guage, incor­rect­ly stat­ing that “jihad” was “a fic­tion­al Eng­lish term with­out an Ara­bic ori­gin” sole­ly used to mis­con­strue Islam as a polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. Also, in August 2021, the GIOR report­ed CAIR had pub­lished a state­ment say­ing offi­cials and jour­nal­ists report­ing about the polit­i­cal upheaval in Afghanistan should refrain from using terms like “Islamist” and “jihadist,” also mis­lead­ing­ly describ­ing them as “fic­tion­al terms with no Ara­bic equivalent.”

CAIR is part of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, a transna­tion­al Islamist net­work cov­ered by the GIOR. CAIR describes itself as “a grass­roots civ­il rights and advo­ca­cy group” and as “America’s largest Islam­ic civ­il lib­er­ties group” and was found­ed in 1994 by three offi­cers of the Islam­ic Asso­ci­a­tion of Pales­tine, part of the US Hamas infra­struc­ture at that time.