Fairfax County Schools' 9/11 Guidance Instructs Teachers to Avoid Attributing Attacks to Islamic Ideology
Fairfax County Public Schools in northern Virginia issued guidance to teachers ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, instructing them not to attribute the ideology and actions of the al Qaeda hijackers to Islam or to Muslims as a religious community. The district, which serves approximately 180,000 students and receives roughly $4 billion annually in taxpayer funding, distributed seven pages of instructional guidance on handling the anniversary.
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Fairfax County Public Schools issued a memorandum to teachers in preparation for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, warning against linking the Islamist motivation of the al Qaeda hijackers to Islam or the broader Muslim community. The guidance, described by the district's central office, acknowledged that "many FCPS families and staff were personally impacted by 9/11 and the United States War on Terror," and emphasized the importance of supporting students' "social-emotional needs" while rejecting racism, hate, and bias.
The Washington Examiner's op-ed, written by Eric Rozenman, a former communications consultant for the Jewish Policy Center, argued that the guidance omits critical factual context about who carried out the attacks and why. Rozenman noted that the guidance contains no acknowledgment of subsequent attacks he attributed to Islamist extremism — including those at Fort Hood in 2009, a California federal building in 2015, and a Florida nightclub in 2016 — nor of the counterterrorism infrastructure built in the wake of 9/11.
The Examiner piece also cited the guidance's inclusion of a warning that "many of our Muslim families worry about sending their children to school each September 11 because of increased incidents of harassment, violence, and hate crimes experienced by Muslim Americans." Rozenman disputed this framing, noting that federal hate crime statistics from 2018 through 2022 showed the primary targets of bias crimes in schools were, in order, Black students, Jewish students, and LGBT students.