For too long, the Montgomery County Board of Education has sought to use its platform for politics rather than education.
With increasing frequency, the school district blasts the family members of its more than 160,000 students with the ruminations of top education officials. And so it has been with the interim Superintendent Monifa McKnight and Board of Education President Brenda Wolff. On Friday, McKnight and Wolff sent an email blast linking to their latest letter meant to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks.
“Let us commit to honest reflection and discussion,” they wrote. “Let us reject the urge to assign blame and point fingers. Let us reject the type of hatred that gave rise to the events of 9/11 and the acts of violence and discrimination that followed.”
How sad. In history and social studies classes, students should point fingers and assign blame.
That is why Congress, in a bipartisan fashion, created the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. Perhaps McKnight and Wolff should instead urge all students to read the report from cover to cover. The commission did not hesitate to assign blame: Al Qaeda was responsible. They were the terrorists. They subscribed to an ideology as noxious as those the United States fought to defeat during World War II.
To shy away from assigning blame because the perpetrators of the attack were Muslims is irresponsible. It is also insulting to Muslims who have done most of the dying in the battle against the most radical elements in their religion. I have always found it ironic that, in Montgomery County where I live, officials walk on eggshells, but in countries in which I travel (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and, in the past, Iran), there is no such political filter against addressing the reality of the problems they face.
More troubling is McKnight’s and Wolff’s implication that somehow America caused or deserved the attacks. How else can anyone read: “Let us reject the type of hatred that gave rise to the events of 9/11?”
After all, it is a given that Americans reject al Qaeda. Residents of one of the most affluent and educated counties in the country do not need their Board of Education to urge them to do so. By implying, however, that hatred goaded al Qaeda into its attack, McKnight and Wolff invert victim and perpetrator. What enraged al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was not American foreign policy per se — he more cynically used the headlines of the day in order to create news hooks for his more gullible followers — but, rather, American culture. He essentially did not differentiate between bombers, bases, and bullets on one hand and color TVs, cosmetics, and Cadillacs on the other.
As for the “acts of violence and discrimination that followed,” perhaps Montgomery County should drop its intersectional myth-making and instead consider FBI statistics.
Here, for example, is the FBI’s hate crime report for 2002. In a country of 300 million, the FBI counted approximately 7,500 hate crimes, 1,400 of which hatred of a religion motivated. Of these, anti-Muslim crimes accounted for just 150, while antisemitism motivated more than 900. Such statistics and patterns have remained largely consistent over subsequent decades. If McKnight and Wolff truly seek to combat discrimination, perhaps they should look in the mirror and stop Montgomery County Public Schools’s discrimination against Asian Americans and its rejection, in the name of equity and the latest political fads, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
Montgomery County deserves officials who operate in the realm of fact rather than myth, and those who put education above attention-seeking and virtue-signaling. McKnight and Wolff are, however, correct that more than 25% of Americans were not born when al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Even more were too young to remember the events of that day. If Montgomery County Public Schools wishes to do its charges a service, it should ensure that its students learn to point fingers and assign blame.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
