When Congressman Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) announced new bipartisan legislation to ensure that American students learn the facts about Hamas’s October 7 massacre, one might expect any organization that claims to oppose bigotry to support it.
But instead, the New Jersey chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) lashed out, accusing Gottheimer and “the Zionist lobby” of “desperation” and attempting to “rewrite history.”
The bill, entitled the October 7th Remembrance Education Act, would direct the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop a model curriculum for teaching about the Hamas atrocities and the antisemitism that fueled them. It was introduced at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey ahead of the one-year anniversary of the attacks.
For Congressman Gottheimer and other sponsors, the goal is simple: ensure that students learn what happened from factual sources, not social media distortion.