New Jersey’s branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has released a 2026-2027 back-to-school guide for parents and students that puts 9/11 alongside advice on Muslim rights in schools and a section on discussing Palestine in the classroom. The guide also includes a page on Muslim Studies: 9/11, turning a school-year resource into something far more contentious than a routine handbook.
That is why the guide is drawing attention now. It is not just a general note for families; it is a curriculum-facing document aimed at classrooms, with material meant for elementary, middle and high school social studies and English classes. The deleted unit plan at the center of it was later removed after earlier reporting by Jewish Onliner, but the version obtained through the Wayback Machine is still available for review and still shows how the lesson was framed.
In the 9/11 section, the guide says the catastrophic events of 9/11 catapulted the Global War on Terror and marked an aggressive shift in US domestic and foreign policy. It also says the attacks brought a renewed and egregious othering of Muslims and those who may appear to be Muslim. CAIR-NJ and Teaching While Muslim say they developed a curriculum with tools to help teachers take a more nuanced approach to 9/11 in their classrooms.
The deleted unit plan goes further. It describes a group self-identifying as al-Qaeda, hailing from the mountains of Afghanistan, as launching separate plane hijackings that ended in different cities and caused the death of almost 3,000 people. It also says the debris from the fallen towers caused lasting health issues in first responders, and it includes a sidebar that says not all terrorists are Muslims, and not all Muslims are terrorists.
But the lesson plan also leans on a reading of the 9/11 Commission Report that does not match what the report itself says. The unit cites the report as saying al-Qaeda launched the attacks in response to America’s support of Israel, involvement in the Persian Gulf War and the vast presence of the US military in the Middle East. The article says page 362 of the 9/11 Commission Report identifies US support for Israel and American military presence in the Middle East as grievances that helped fuel al-Qaeda’s extremism, but it does not say 9/11 was carried out in response to those grievances.
That gap matters because the guide is meant to shape what parents and students see before the school year begins. It says terrorism is defined differently by different groups of people, says American Muslims, Islamic scholars and governments in Muslim-majority countries condemned the attacks, and argues that 9/11 produced a stark shift in US policy and state-sponsored Islamophobia in the US and abroad. The CAIR National annual back-to-school guide says 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.
The result is a guide that tries to present 9/11 as a classroom topic about rights, language and aftermath, while also tying it to grievances that remain disputed in how they are framed. The linked unit plan has already been deleted, but the questions it raised have not been resolved, and the next people to confront them will likely be the teachers and families who open the guide for the new school year.
