CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

A new, in-depth report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism is raising questions about the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)’s efforts to influence how American public schools teach Israel, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, terrorism, and antisemitism.

Released on Wednesday, the report, “The Long Game: CAIR’s Campaign to Influence K-12 Education,” by researchers Asher Stern and David Collins, documents the organization’s efforts to reach educators, school administrators, and state education officials through curriculum resources, advocacy campaigns, legal initiatives, and proposed policy changes. The authors argue that these activities warrant greater public scrutiny, particularly when they touch on politically sensitive subjects involving Israel and Jewish students.

The findings come amid intense debate over how American schools should teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including how to address criticism of Israel without normalizing antisemitic rhetoric or minimizing attacks on Israeli civilians.

CAIR, which describes itself as the country’s largest Muslim civil-rights and advocacy organization, has pursued a range of school-related initiatives. The report examines activities in Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and Washington State, finding that the group’s results have varied but that it has established channels through which it can participate in educational policy discussions.

“Where advocacy efforts from outsiders like CAIR reach the level of creating guidance, curriculum, or policy development, the public must know what role CAIR played, what it proposed, and what officials accepted,” the authors write.

CAIR has been designated by multiple US states as a terrorist group and scrutinized by federal authorities over alleged ties to Hamas.

One focus of Stern and Collins’s report is CAIR’s August 2026 expansion of its “Unhostile Campus Campaign” into elementary and secondary education. Its 2026–2027 back-to-school resource guide directs students, parents, and educators to materials on Palestine advocacy, Gaza, the Sept. 11 attacks, antisemitism, and definitions of terrorism, alongside resources on religious accommodation and discrimination.

The authors argue that CAIR’s school-related work extends beyond protecting Muslim students from discrimination to efforts to influence how schools discuss Israel, Zionism, terrorism, and the Palestinian national movement.

Those questions have significant implications for Jewish students and the broader educational environment.

The report’s concerns are particularly relevant when educational resources present contested political claims as established facts, or when discussions of terrorism emphasize grievances against the United States and Israel without adequately explaining the ideology and actions of the perpetrators.

In a separate investigation published in August, critics highlighted a curriculum linked from CAIR’s back-to-school guide that included Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” among recommended high-school resources and discussed US support for Israel as one of the factors behind the Sept. 11 attacks. CAIR subsequently removed the link from its national guide, according to contemporaneous reporting.

The George Washington University researchers identify Washington State as the strongest example in their investigation of CAIR’s access to an education policymaking process.

According to the report, CAIR’s Washington chapter said it spent months exchanging proposed revisions with the state education agency before replacement guidance addressing a range of contentious issues was published.

“CAIR Washington says it spent months exchanging revisions with the state education agency before a replacement curriculum guidance addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, discriminatory harassment, student protests, and political speech,” the report reads.

The public record confirms that the replacement guidance was adopted, the researchers write.

The findings from Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey are less conclusive. The authors document efforts to influence education policy in those states but characterize the results as limited or difficult to assess.

The report also examines CAIR’s institutional history, citing evidence introduced in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of providing material support to Hamas.

Federal records placed CAIR co-founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad at a 1993 meeting of the Palestine Committee, a US Muslim Brotherhood structure that the report describes as supporting Hamas, the terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip. A 1994 Palestine Committee agenda also listed CAIR among the committee’s working organizations.

The report notes that the FBI sharply restricted non-investigative contacts with CAIR in 2008, in part because of evidence introduced during the Holy Land Foundation case. It also cites the Biden administration’s 2023 decision to remove CAIR from a list of partner organizations associated with the White House’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism following controversial remarks by Awad about the Oct. 7 attacks.

These historical records form part of the authors’ rationale for examining CAIR’s participation in public education. They do not, by themselves, establish that every CAIR initiative is extremist or that every educational resource the organization promotes is antisemitic. CAIR has not been convicted of providing material support to Hamas in the Holy Land Foundation case; the convictions were against the foundation and its leaders.

Nevertheless, the group’s history and the controversy surrounding its public statements make transparency about its role in public education a subject of scrutiny.

Critics argue that a credible curriculum must also acknowledge the history of Jewish peoplehood and antisemitism, Israel’s security concerns, and the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 2023, when Hamas-led attackers killed approximately 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 hostages.

In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association'” of CAIR with Hamas.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'”

CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel.

The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago in November 2023. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”