Yesterday, education blogger Joanne Jacobs wrote about a contest, jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and Dickinson College, designed to help teachers address the subject of the September 11 attacks in particular and terrorism in general. The contest called for lesson plans to help students "confront and make sense of the horrific events of that day." However, as Jacob Laksin reports in Front Page Magazine, "if the contest's eventual winners are any indication, there was yet another, unspoken criterion: the lesson plans had to encourage students in the notion that the terrorist attacks, however horrific, were the direct consequence of an abominably misguided U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East." To whit, the winning elementary school lesson urges students to consider the attacks "in the broader context of global injustice" by answering such tough questions as "why do they hate us"; the middle school lesson suggests that teaching students the following vocabulary words will help them understand terrorism: "Al Qaeda," "Saddam Hussein," "stereotype," "Taliban," and "right wing" ("Left wing" was noticeably absent from the lesson.); and the winning high school lesson "exhorts teachers to present the Patriot Act against the backdrop of the Japanese internment during World War II." Though Dickinson College professor David Commins, who helped oversee the contest, admits that in each of the winning lessons, "there is an assumption that U.S. foreign policy is responsible for the attacks of September 11," he insists that that wasn't the intent of the contest. "In terms of the several dozen lesson plans that came before the judges, not one of them stated a view other than that it was the result of U.S. foreign policy." Of course, Commins also admits that even "if there had been lesson plans that presented the point of view that these people were rabidly anti-American, and who would carry out attacks no matter what, I would not have included it."
"The ABC's of anti-Americanism," by Jacob Laksin, Front Page Magazine, November 9, 2004
"Blame America first and last," joannejacobs.com, November 10, 2004