The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has released its 2026-2027 nationwide back-to-school guide, a resource that formally endorses a curriculum instructing students that the 9/11 terror attacks were sparked by American foreign policy in the Middle East and U.S. support for Israel, according to documents obtained via the Wayback Machine and reporting by Jewish Onliner and The Jerusalem Post.
CAIR National Endorses K-12 9/11 Curriculum
The 2026-2027 nationwide back-to-school guide represents an institutional escalation, extending material previously distributed by state chapters down to K-12 schools as part of CAIR’s “Unhostile Campus Campaign,” according to Jewish Onliner. Under a section titled “Guidance on Challenging Topics: 25th Anniversary of 9/11 and Tools for Classrooms,” CAIR’s guide hyperlinks a classroom curriculum titled “The Impact of 9/11 on Muslims,” developed by CAIR-New Jersey and a group called Teaching While Muslim. The curriculum is designed for use in elementary, middle, and high school social studies and English classes, instructing educators to share the resource with school boards and administrators.
According to the document obtained by The Jerusalem Post, the text describes the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks as “a group self-identifying as al-Qaeda hailing from the mountains of Afghanistan.” The resource does not use the word “terrorist” to describe the attackers who caused the deaths of almost 3,000 people. Instead, the curriculum asserts that al-Qaeda “launched the attacks in response to America’s support of Israel, their involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and the vast presence of the US military in the Middle East.”
Context of the 9/11 Commission Report and Bin Laden References
While page 362 of the 9/11 Commission Report identifies U.S. support for Israel and American military presence in the Middle East as grievances that helped fuel al-Qaeda’s extremism, the official report at no point states that the 9/11 attacks were launched in response to those factors. Furthermore, the CAIR-New Jersey resource states that “terrorism is defined differently by different groups of people,” which Jewish Onliner and other reports note implies a redefinition of the attacks without explicitly stating they were acts of terrorism.
The resource also references Osama bin Laden, introducing him to students as “a man named Osama bin Laden” — an anti-Soviet fighter the U.S. once supported. For high school classrooms, the curriculum recommends The Guardian’s full text of bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” a manifesto in which bin Laden justified the attacks and called for the mass killing of Americans and Jews, according to Jewish Onliner. Additionally, the guide suggests students view the film “V for Vendetta” as a background resource.
Following earlier reporting by Jewish Onliner, CAIR deleted the 9/11 unit plan website. The CAIR National annual back-to-school guide subsequently added a note stating: “An earlier version of the document did not go through proper vetting and included a link to a primary source document that was removed in November 2025.” Despite congressional scrutiny and a formal petition from Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) alerting the Department of Education to CAIR’s K-12 partnerships, the organization published the nationwide guide in August 2026.
Worth a look