Texas Rewrites Its Israel Lessons, and Cardoza-Moore Asks Why a Terror-Designated CAIR Got a Say

Texas has rewritten what its high school students will learn about Israel, the Torah and America’s Judeo-Christian roots, and the pro-Israel advocate who pressed the State Board of Education hardest for those changes says the board listened. On Wednesday, September 16, Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, the group led by Laurie Cardoza-Moore, said the board had accepted several of its recommendations, while she kept asking the question that has hung over this entire review: why a group the governor of Texas designated a terrorist organization was given a seat at the table at all.

Her answer to that question has been consistent since she first took the microphone in Austin. “How can we let terrorists decide our children’s curriculum?” she said in a statement released by her group.

What the board actually adopted

The board gave final approval to revised high school social studies standards on September 4, by an 8-4 vote, after months of hearings that began in the spring. According to Newsweek, the new standards are set to reach high school classrooms in the 2033-34 school year, but Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the country, and what it requires tends to shape what publishers print for everyone else.

Under the new standards, high school U.S. and World History students will identify 1948 as the year modern Israel was established “in the ancestral homeland of the Jews,” and will identify President Harry Truman as the first world leader to formally recognize the Jewish state. The new wording drops language crediting the United Nations with establishing Israel.

The World History standards also narrow the list of civilizations credited with shaping the American founding to Israel, Greece and Rome, and require students to study ancient Hebrew contributions, including monotheism and the “moral and ethical teachings found in the Torah.” The shorter list replaces a longer one that also included Persia, India and China.

None of that is radical. It is simply true. Israel was reborn in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, and the Hebrew Bible shaped the moral vocabulary of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence. For years, Texas classrooms taught a version of history that blurred both facts.

The fight over who gets a say

The more explosive battle was over the Council on American-Islamic Relations. On November 18, 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a proclamation designating both the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations under state authority. His office said the groups “are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas,” and Abbott said the groups have “long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law.”

The proclamation, as reported by Jewish Insider, calls CAIR a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and an effective front group for Hamas in the United States. It also cites the fact that federal prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which the foundation and five of its leaders were convicted in 2008 of providing material support to Hamas.

Even so, CAIR kept showing up to testify. At an April hearing, reported by The Washington Post, board member Brandon Hall objected before a CAIR staffer could speak, asking his colleagues, “Will you have a designated foreign terrorist organization testify at the State Board of Education?” Board Chair Aaron Kinsey ruled that “the testifier still has First Amendment rights,” and Hall and fellow member Julie Pickren walked out of the room.

Cardoza-Moore went to the board’s June hearing and found CAIR-affiliated representatives scheduled to testify again. In a statement issued before she spoke, she put it bluntly: “We cannot allow Texas textbooks to be written by Hamas.” She called CAIR “the US arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist anti-American organization,” and argued that “Students deserve historical accuracy, not political indoctrination.” In her testimony, according to a transcript her group provided and reported by the Jerusalem Post, she questioned why CAIR representatives were allowed to address the board at all given Abbott’s designation.

CAIR’s side

CAIR rejects all of it. The group was never indicted in the Holy Land Foundation case and has denied the allegations. It has filed a federal lawsuit against Abbott, challenging the designation as unconstitutional and defamatory. When the proclamation came down, CAIR said, “our civil rights organization is an independent voice that answers to the American people.”

In the curriculum fight itself, CAIR argued at the April hearing that the drafts wrongly associated terrorism with one religion, and after the final vote its Austin office said the standards’ treatment of Islam would encourage prejudice against Muslim students and asked the board to “reconsider the standards.”

It is worth noting that the designation is a state action. The federal government has never designated CAIR a terrorist organization. But Texas has, and its own state board was still taking curriculum advice from the group months later.

Why it matters beyond Texas

Cardoza-Moore has said for years that Texas standards ripple outward. In June she said they “often influence educational content adopted by more than twenty other states.” Her group claims the changes could reach as many as 25 million students nationwide, a figure the Jerusalem Post noted came without supporting evidence. Whatever the precise number, the principle is clear: the people who write the standards decide what an entire generation believes about Israel, about terrorism and about its own country.

She also wants more than a single win. “For decades I have fought to keep anti-American and anti-Semitic content out of our classrooms,” she said. Texas just took her side on Israel’s founding and the Torah. The harder question, whether a state that calls a group a terrorist organization should also be workshopping its children’s history lessons with that group, is one the board still has not answered.

If Texas means what it says about CAIR, the group that earned a terror designation should not also be helping write the textbooks.

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