Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in ZAKA, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team.
Twenty-five years after nineteen Muslim terrorists murdered three thousand Americans in the name of a specific, published, endlessly reiterated religious ideology of violent global conquest, the largest school district in Virginia handed its teachers a six-page document instructing them not to bring it up. Fairfax County Public Schools tells educators not to "associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims," and not to "center the extremists or the acts of the extremists." It never names Osama bin Laden. It never names Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It contains roughly thirty references to Islam, anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobic rhetoric, and spends perhaps fifteen percent of its length on the events of that bloody day.
A retired vice admiral who was inside the Pentagon when the plane came through the wall called the guide vanilla. He was being oddly polite about a cowardice that any society that wants to live should be confronting far more forcefully.
Virginia went further. A 2021 Department of Education webinar for teachers, produced under a Democratic governor, instructed them to describe September 11 as a foreign attack by extremists, advised that naming the hijackers was not a relevant detail, and opened from the premise that there is no Muslim responsibility to examine. Glenn Youngkin's administration took it down. This spring the General Assembly put it back and Governor Spanberger signed the bill. A legislature convened, debated, voted, and enacted into law the restoration of a training video whose pedagogical core is that American schoolchildren should not be told who attacked them or why. Not a rogue consultant. Not a viral lesson plan. A statute mandating vagueness.
The material filling the vacuum nationally is of a piece.
"Teaching Beyond September 11th," developed at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and recommended by the education departments of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Oregon, gives the attacks themselves a single paragraph. It counts the nineteen hijackers among the dead, as though they had been passengers. It cannot bring itself to use the word "terrorist," and reports that the United States "accused" bin Laden of masterminding the plot, converting a man's own filmed confessions into an allegation the Americans generated from their gut.
New York City's education department spent more than a million dollars over fourteen years on teacher training built around the putative issue of post-9/11 Islamophobia. Only two states, Arizona and Florida, require that the attack be taught at all.
This is not squeamishness. What is being taught is a positive doctrine of radical leftist indoctrination: that inquiry into the enemy's identity, religious ideology, and openly stated reasons is itself the moral offense. Not inaccurate. Not unkind. Offensive, in the technical sense that it constitutes an unfair act of aggression against a protected party which endangers innocent Muslims. Once you accept that premise, everything downstream follows with perfect and enervating logic:
You cannot name him. You cannot quote him. You cannot ask what he believed, because the asking is the true crime, and the child who asks must be redirected before he gets an answer. America's slavish devotion to "conversation" has reached peak suicidality: a civilization that has decided naming your enemy and his religion is impolite or triggering - while your enemy remains entirely unembarrassed about naming you, and worse.
None of this was improvised in a curriculum office in 2021, and the pedigree is not a secret. In 1965 Herbert Marcuse argued that even-handed tolerance is a fraud, because giving every position the same hearing preserves whichever position already holds power. His remedy was tolerance with a thumb on the scale, withdrawn from the right and extended to the left, on the grounds that suppression in the service of justice and liberation is not suppression at all.
Six years later he wrote to the German radical Rudi Dutschke endorsing what Dutschke had christened the long march through the institutions, and spelled out the method: occupy the institutions, work against them from inside them, build counterinstitutions within their walls. Underneath both sits Antonio Gramsci, who understood that a free society is taken trench by trench, through the schools and presses that manufacture what a people takes for granted. A district guide telling teachers to disrupt colleagues who use the wrong vocabulary is not an innovation. It is that essay as a radically visionary lesson plan, written by educators who have never heard the name Marcuse. A doctrine has fully arrived only when the people executing it experience it and brand it as simple decency.
And this is why the people cheering for killers are not a separate phenomenon. The examples here are Islamic, but the rot is more pervasive, and it bears fruit wherever it is planted. Brian Thompson was shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk and within days a substantial number of young Americans had located the real story in the claims-denial rate of a health insurer.
Luigi Mangione became a folk hero to people who have never disputed that he pulled the trigger, which is the point.
Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck in front of a crowd and the discourse turned, almost without pausing for breath, to an audit of his opinions.
The murdered men were demoted from subject to setting, a stage on which systemic grievance could be examined by self-ordained justice warriors. That is the identical move Fairfax makes. Do not center the known perpetrator - completely and intentionally regardless of his perfidy. Center the conditions. The only difference is that one produces a fandom and the other a lesson plan, and the lesson plan came first and cuts deeper.
The multi-generational, pan-cultural carriers of this bug are not mysterious. The teachers unions sit astride the pipeline and have made activism in the name of justice the organizing purpose of professional development, and the National Education Association's own 9/11 material has reached for Edward Said, who located the cause of the attacks in American support for the Jewish state.
Academia supplies the theory and launders it into credentials. A press staffed almost entirely by that academy's graduates ratifies it, so that a child taught not to center the extremists meets, at twenty-four, a news environment confirming he was taught correctly. If I were feeling generous I would say none of them are radical ideologues at all, only professionals who grasped long ago that persuading a population does not begin with an election. It begins in kindergarten, it takes twenty years, and they were willing to wait. The generosity makes the picture worse, because a conviction can be argued with and a long con cannot, and by the time it comes to fruition the inversion will be irreversible.
A society taught from childhood to withhold judgment retains no instrument with which to correct or defend itself. It does not collapse. It rots from the inside out, on schedule, until the unnameable enemy need only stroll in and take what is no longer defended.
Soft moral relativism of yesteryear was always destined to shift to hard moral inversion. It could not have ended anywhere else. If no framework may be ranked above another, judgment itself becomes the sole available sin, and the only people left who can be judged are the ones still doing the judging. The murderer has a context. The victim has, at best, a begrudging mention.
The teacher who says plainly that nineteen men murdered three thousand civilians because they believed Allah and Islam required it has committed the one unforgivable act, which is to have asserted something. The doctrine never produces symmetry. Nobody is told to avoid centering the extremist when he is a white nationalist, and nobody should be. The protection runs one direction, which tells you it was never a principle about violence. It was a principle about power, and about shaping America's next cohort of teachers and voters until the subversion is self-perpetuating and permanent.
Asra Nomani, the American Muslim journalist who obtained the Fairfax guide, said she was disturbed by the attempt to convert Muslim students into the primary victims of 9/11. She understands what the authors of these curricula do not: a faith is not honored by being placed beyond query and conclusion. It is infantilized. The nineteen told us who they were, in writing, at length, in advance and afterward.
We have spent twenty-five years and a great deal of public money building an apparatus whose central function is to guarantee that no American child ever finds out who perpetrated 9/11. They are not confused about us. We have proudly made a curriculum out of being confused about them, and continue to do so at our own peril.
