CNN wanted to play defense for Islam.
The network’s host came loaded with Pew surveys and George W. Bush clips, ready to put a Texas education official on the defensive.
What happened next left the anchor with nowhere to go.
What Texas Actually Did
The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to a revamped high school social studies curriculum that teaches students “radical Islam” motivated the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The curriculum also requires students to examine early Islam through Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” the “normalization of slavery,” and the taking of female captives as “harem slaves.”
Board Chair Aaron Kinsey joined CNN’s First of All with Victor Blackwell one day after the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. The attacks were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, who quoted the Quran and ordered his followers to “slay the pagans” in his 1998 fatwa against the West.
Kinsey didn’t flinch. He told Blackwell the curriculum has been through a five-year update process, and naming radical Islam as a motivating force behind 9/11 was not a political choice. It was an accurate one.
“It’s only appropriate that when we’re studying world history, that we update it to include the events of 9/11… now to the specifics on why we characterized it as ‘radical Islam,’ that’s because it’s exactly what it is,” Kinsey said. “It’s radical Islamic terrorists. That’s what it was.”
He pressed further, noting that Blackwell or anyone else could do a “simple Google search” and confirm that bin Laden and his operatives were driven by religious ideology.
“I think that you would characterize those [beliefs] as radical. They are tied to foreign policy, there are some other aspects to [it], but they wanted to expel the United States from the Middle East because they were concerned we were near their holy sites,” Kinsey said. “So I don’t know how else you could characterize the murder of 2,977 people, other than ‘radical.'”
What CNN Was Actually Arguing
Blackwell opened the segment by lamenting that the Republican Party under President Donald Trump had moved away from the Muslim-friendly posture George W. Bush adopted in the days after September 11. He played a clip of Bush saying he felt it was critical to tell Americans “Islam was a religion of peace.”
Then came the Pew survey. Blackwell noted that 51% of Americans now believe Islam encourages violence more than other religions, up from 26% who felt that way in early 2002. The implication was clear: the Texas curriculum is feeding dangerous public sentiment.
Blackwell pushed back on the curriculum’s framing, saying bin Laden was obviously a “jihadist” but the Texas standards fell short because they did not “go through any of those other factors” that may have spurred him to plan the attacks. He questioned why the curriculum mentioned Islam at all when discussing the tragedy.
But here’s the thing. The attacks were carried out by Islamic terrorists directed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. That is not a contested claim. It is the settled historical record. Nineteen hijackers, most of them Saudi nationals, murdered nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. The ideology that drove them was radical Islam. Teaching that to American students is not bigotry. It’s basic historical literacy.
Kinsey later told Blackwell he was fixated on a “tiny piece” of the curriculum which merely provided context and helped students understand “how the world evolved and how we got to where we are today.” Blackwell protested, saying it was not “tiny” to Muslim students in Texas, before ending the interview there.
And that’s where the CNN logic breaks down entirely. The question of whether a curriculum is accurate is separate from the question of whether some students might find it uncomfortable. Accuracy doesn’t yield to discomfort. If it did, no difficult chapter of any civilization’s history could ever be taught honestly.
What the Establishment Critics Got Wrong
The opposition to this curriculum followed a predictable script. Critics from CAIR Texas accused the board of targeting Islam while mishandling other historical subjects, claiming the decision to “single out and denigrate Islam, minimize the brutal realities of slavery and segregation, and entirely erase Palestinian history is an affront to our system of education and the First Amendment.”
That’s a lot of accusations bundled into one statement. But none of them change what happened on September 11, 2001. Islamic terrorists trained and directed by Osama bin Laden executed a carefully planned mass-murder operation. That is not a “caricature.” It is the historical record, confirmed by the 9/11 Commission, by court proceedings, by confessions, and by bin Laden’s own recorded statements.
Kinsey pushed back on critics who said the board was inflaming religious divisions, calling their objections an attempt to “sensationalize all these topics and make them seem more divisive than they actually are.” He added that board members “worked through, democratically, how to make those choices on behalf of our constituents” and said he believed they “did an exceptional job overall.”
Republican board member Julie Pickren framed the vote in even starker terms, describing it as the culmination of more than a decade of effort. “This social studies law that got us here, I’ve been working on for over 10 years with the House and the Senate, the Texas House and Texas Senate… and so this is such a huge accomplishment; this vote kind of bookends 12 years of life’s work,” Pickren said.
The revised curriculum is expected to reach Texas classrooms during the 2030-31 school year.
What’s worth noticing is what CNN’s approach reveals about how the media establishment handles the history of September 11. Blackwell’s framing treated the curriculum’s accuracy as secondary to its optics. The concern wasn’t whether the material was true. It was whether naming radical Islam as a motivating force might make some people feel singled out.
But protecting students from accurate history is not education. It’s political management dressed up as sensitivity. And Texas just refused to play along.
The same intelligence bureaucracy that failed to stop the 9/11 attacks — despite multiple warnings about an al-Qaeda plot circulating inside the CIA and FBI in the months before the attacks — has never fully reckoned with that failure. The warnings existed. The pieces were inside the system. And the bureaucracy didn’t connect them. Teaching students about what actually happened, who did it, and why they did it, is the bare minimum owed to the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered that morning.
Kinsey’s position wasn’t complicated. Radical Islamic terrorists killed 2,977 Americans. That belongs in a history class. CNN’s argument, stripped of the Pew surveys and the Bush clips, was essentially that saying so out loud is the real problem. Texas voters and their elected representatives disagreed. And the curriculum will reflect that.
Sources: Mediaite, “Texas Education Boss Clashes With MS Now Host Over Revamped Curriculum Teaching ‘Radical Islam’ Motivated 9/11: ‘That’s What It Was'”; Fox News, “Texas education board approves controversial curriculum changes tying ‘radical Islam’ to 9/11 attacks”; Newsmax, “Texas Board of Ed Chair to Newsmax: Teach 9/11 Truth”
