The attacks on September 11, 2001, unleashed a wave of Islamophobia in the United States that resulted in widespread harassment and persecution of Muslim Americans. In addition to vigilante attacks targeting Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim, there was also state repression including police roundups, community surveillance…
Page A3From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 12 September 2026
Federalist demands 9/11 blame Islam; Texas already did, UCLA hosted the mastermind's lawyer, a victim's son says stop.
As it ran on the front
The Federalist ran a piece this week accusing schools and "corporate media" of writing Islamic terrorists out of the 9/11 lesson plan, pointing to a six-page guidance letter that tells teachers not to associate the attacks with Islam or Muslims. Four days earlier, the Texas State Board of Education had already reached the opposite conclusion, approving standard language that ties "radical Islam" to the attacks rather than naming the specific groups involved. Whatever erasure the Federalist is worried about, the largest textbook market in the country closed the gap before the complaint ran.
The same week, on the other coast, UCLA hosted a 25th-anniversary symposium on terrorism that put a lawyer for the attacks' mastermind on a panel. So the range of what counts as an acceptable 9/11 lesson this fall runs from a state mandate naming "radical Islam" in the standard to a university panel featuring the defense, and neither end asked the people the attacks actually happened to.…
…(cont) Someone did ask, on the record, at the 25th-anniversary commemoration at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. Michael Massaroli Jr., whose father was killed in the towers, told the crowd that using the tragedy to spread anti-Muslim bigotry does his father's legacy "no honor," and asked, plainly, that people stop. His statement doesn't sit inside either camp's argument, because it isn't an argument about curriculum at all — it's a complaint about being used, filed by the one party with standing to file it.
This isn't new either. A Democracy Now retrospective published two days before Massaroli spoke laid out what the last round of blaming a religion for the attacks actually produced: vigilante harassment, police roundups, surveillance of Muslim communities, terrorism prosecutions built on thin evidence, and mass deportations, all documented in the public record. That's not a hypothetical cost of the Texas language. That's the receipt for the last time a state legislature decided which faith gets blamed in the standard.
So the fight was never really about erasure. Erasure would require the topic to actually be missing, and it isn't missing from Texas, and it isn't missing from UCLA's guest list. It's a fight over who gets to hold the pen — a state board, a law school, a cable segment — while the son of a man who died in the towers stands at the memorial built to hold nearly three thousand names, and asks all of them, plainly, to stop.
“This is the con laid out in real time: one outlet says schools erased Islam from the 9/11 lesson, a state board already voted to legislate it back in as blame, and a university gave the defense a microphone — and the man whose father actually died in the towers is the one asking the amplifiers to stop. Follow the podium, not the outrage: a legislature writes the standard, the standard prints the textbook, the textbook ships to your kid's district, and neither the board nor the university needed his father's death to make their case — they needed the tragedy. That's the racket: grief becomes curriculum becomes headline, and the family gets one sentence at the end of somebody else's story.”
“The guidance letter is a real document, teachers really are told not to link the attacks to Islam, and that's a fair concern about kids getting the full history — meanwhile Texas mandating "radical Islam" in the same year is also just teaching the full history, so both states are right, which — did I say both states are right? That's not what I — look, the guidance letter is about erasure and the Texas curriculum is about accuracy, two completely different categories, and the UCLA panel is just academic freedom, none of these are related, why would anyone put them on the same page.”
The receipts
Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and others and sparked a worldwide US-led war on terrorism that has left nearly one million people dead , some relatives of 9/11 victims pleaded that their grief must not be weaponized in the form of anti-Muslim bigotry. Michael…
UCLA disgraced itself this week by hosting a symposium on terrorism on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 that featured radical critics of US counterterror policy, and a lawyer for al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
One six-page guidance letter advises teachers to refrain from 'associat[ing] the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims.'
· Texas Board of Education approves controversial new high school curriculum tying ‘radical Islam’ to 9/11 attacks from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.