Add The New York Post on Google Only two US states legally require that 9/11 be taught in public schools — and the void is being filled with twisted lefty lessons blaming America, downplaying Islamic terrorism and portraying Islamophobia as the real tragedy.
The hijacked history of America’s darkest day has created a lost generation. According to one shocking new study, two-thirds of American Middle East studies professors say college kids cannot identify who attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001 or why.
New York requires schools to observe a moment of silence on Sept. 11 and the state Board of Regents includes teaching about the attacks in social studies standards, but the state has no standard curriculum covering the attacks.
Only Arizona and Florida mandate that the 9/11 attacks be taught in schools. Ten states have statutes that encourage teaching about the attacks — which could mean anything from a moment of silence, classwork, or a school assembly, according to an August University of Wisconsin Study.
“We made a promise to ‘Never Forget’, but today, only a handful of states require 9/11 to be taught in their schools,” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R- Long Island), who is pushing legislation to mandate 9/11 curriculum be taught in all 50 states, told The Post.
In the absence of mandatory standards, leftist activists — some backed by billionaire George Soros — are producing lesson plans filled with woke distortions of the attacks, even in New York City schools, according to an analysis from the North America Values Institute, an education watchdog.
“Teaching Beyond September 11th” — a radical retelling of 9/11 that devotes a single paragraph to the horrific attacks and fails to refer to the murderous Islamic extremists as terrorists — focuses leassons on “Right-Wing Extremism” and “Islamophobia and the Oval Office.”
The curriculum was developed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, and includes this passage: “On the 11th of September 2001, 19 hijackers flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one airplane into the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. A total of 2,996 people were killed, including the hijackers.”
Education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Oregon all recommend “Teaching Beyond September 11th” in public schools.
The lesson does not provide the radical Jihadist motivations of the terrorists, and appears to equivocate on whether Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks.
“The US accused Saudi national Osama bin Laden, living in Afghanistan at the time, of being the mastermind behind the attacks,” the lesson states, without mentioning bin Laden’s multiple confessions or his broader campaign of terrorism and declaration of Jihad against the US — which he labeled the “worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.”
Other topics in “Teaching Beyond September 11th” include “Surveillance of Muslims,” “The Muslim and African Ban,” and “Muslim Youth and Resistance.”
A lesson on the 2005 riots over a Danish cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad — which caused the deaths of 250 people globally — asks students to discuss how the media “presented certain values as more important than the fact that the cartoons were offensive and racist.”
Zineb Riboua, a Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute, told The Post that the attempts to rewrite 9/11 history was part of a broader leftist project.
“You teach kids that America is responsible for the atrocities around the world to develop a moral framework that can be activated very quickly to get policies that reduce America’s power and sovereignty,” Riboua said.
She added that leftist activists were taking a page out of The Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps playbook in targeting their propaganda at schoolchildren.
“Ayatollah Khamenei said the best audience to target is students,” she said.
The woke propaganda appears to be having its desired affect, according to a damning new poll.
An overwhelming majority (66%) of American Middle East Studies professors believe that college students cannot correctly identify who the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were or what its causes were, according to a poll released by the academic research nonprofit the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
The poll also finds that the historical hijacking is not limited to America’s public schools. Two thirds of Middle East Studies professors said that scholarly academic work actively runs cover for regimes, groups and ideologies that hate America, according to the survey of 470 respondents.
Not to be outdone, a woke NYC teacher has taken it upon himself to assign his students Osama Bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America.”
Adam Feinberg, who teaches at Brooklyn’s City Polytechnic High School, then has them answer questions based on the propaganda text, such as, “Why do you think Osama bin Laden hates Jews so much?”
Other questions include, “For what reasons does he believe that America is the ‘worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind?'”
He also asks, “Find the word ‘usury’. It means lending money with high interest rates. Why do you think Osama bin Laden disagrees with this?”
He uploaded the vile worksheet, designed for ninth through12th graders to the American Federation of Teachers Share My Lesson Portal in February 2020.
Feinberg, who made $113,394 in 2025, routinely disseminates his leftist ideology on social media, such as sharing a meme mocking assassinated conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk shortly after his death. Feinberg did not deny the worksheet belonged to him but declined further comment.
“Teaching Beyond September 11th,” released in 2020, was developed for high school and early college students and focuses on “Islamophobia, xenophobia, civil liberties, long-lasting wars, media and representation,” according to its website.
The lessons do not include the enduring legacy of the attacks on the families of the victims, nor of the nearly 10,000 first responders and civilians who have since died from illnesses caused by Ground Zero toxins.
The goal of the curriculum is to “relate anti-Muslim racism/violence with other forms of racism and violence (e.g. Black Lives Matter; xenophobia, anti-Semitism etc.) in the United States and abroad,” per its website.
One of the lead developers of the curriculum was Deepa Iyer, who runs the social justice nonprofit Solidarity Is, which is part of the Soros-funded organization Building Movement Project.
Soros — notorious for raining chaos on American cities by electing soft-on-crime DAs and funding radical protest movements — has donated at least $1.35 million to the Building Movement Project via its fiscal sponsor Third Sector New England, which has over $92 million in revenue, according to public records.
Other academics who developed the coursework come from organizations like the allegedly Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations and the Saudi-funded The Bridge Initiative on Islamophobia at Georgetown University, which is part of the $20 million Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Gail Silke, whose police officer brother Stephen Driscoll, 38, was killed in the South Tower on 9/11, is galled by the history-erasing campaign — especially in the city whose motto for the attacks is “Never Forget.”
“They’re not affected by it, they’re not in our shoes, and they don’t want to be in our shoes. Those people can kiss my ass,” the mom of two said.
“I find these woke theories offensive; they should teach what happened and who did it,” said Kevin Byrnes, whose father, Kevin Byrnes Sr. was an FDNY battalion chief and died from 9/11-related illness in 2004.
A Manhattan mother whose father-in-law was killed on 9/11 said her children would frequently come home crying from the blame-America indoctrination spewed by their leftist teachers.
“They were disgusted with the s–t they were taught, it’s not fair, they lost their grandfather,” she said.
Critics said the campaign was nothing short of Orwellian.
“Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by al Qaeda on September 11th. They were the victims. The terrorists were the perpetrators. Any curriculum that blurs that fundamental truth, or makes the victims secondary to a political narrative, isn’t teaching history, it’s rewriting it,” state Assemblyman Josh Slater (R-Yorktown) said.
“This curriculum erases the victims of 9/11, erases the causes of 9/11 and instead uses the terrorist attack and its aftermath as a convenient vehicle to push a political agenda and activism onto children,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, director of research for the North American Values Institute, referring to the “Teaching Beyond September 11th” curriculum.
Soros and the city Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the UPenn GSE stated that the “Teaching Beyond September 11th” curriculum was designed to focus on what came after the attacks and is intended as a supplement to 9/11 coursework.
An NYC DOE spokesperson said in a statement that the “Teaching Beyond September 11th” curriculum was just one of as some 40 options presented to NYC teachers, and that other curriculums on the list focus on the victims of the attack and 9/11’s effect on their family and friends.
