Posted on 09/18/2015 10:23:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Ahmed Mohamed is a human Rorschach test. Look at that face and tell me what you see: Muslim-American? African-American? I myself see something very familiar: Nerd-American.
Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Texas and the son of an immigrant family from Sudan, is a cause célèbre just at the moment because he was handcuffed, frog-marched out of a classroom, and arrested for the crime of showing off his technological chops by building an electronic clock and bringing it to school to show his engineering teacher. (Let us now praise MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for the fact that 14-year-olds there have engineering teachers.) Apparently, an English teacher — it had to be an English teacher — thought the device looked like a bomb.
It didn’t. But it looked a hell of a lot more like a bomb than that half-eaten Pop-Tart in the possession of that seven-year-old in Maryland looked like a gun, yet the child was suspended; it was surely more reasonable to think that those circuit boards constituted a bomb than to think that the bang-bang! hand gesture of a ten-year-old in Milford, Mass., constituted a serious threat to shoot somebody; taking a high-school kid into custody after a teacher reports a possible bomb threat is surely no more irrational than arresting an eighth-grader over an NRA T-shirt.
Mohamed’s father says that his son was mistreated because the incident happened a few days after the annual commemoration of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, and because his name is Mohamed. The story immediately became ubiquitous not because of what actually happened — boneheaded as that was — but because it can be used to further a story that the media already want to tell: that the United States is morally corrupt and irredeemably racist; that Muslims are under siege; that “white privilege” blinds the majority of Americans to the corruption at the heart of everything red, white, and blue. Muslim kid meets paranoia in Texas is A-1 copy; NRA-wearing kid meets paranoia in West Virginia, not so much.
President Barack Obama, never one to miss an opportunity for cheap moral preening, invited Mohamed to the White House. That’s an interesting gesture: Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what would happen if a young man showed up at the White House visitors’ center with a backpack in which was a homemade device full of circuit boards joined to a timing device? I do not frequent the White House, but I often am in the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, and my best guess is that if I’d tried to bring Mohamed’s clock into one of those places, there would have been guns drawn.
“Oh, but those are high-security environments!” you might be tempted to protest. Mohamed was arrested by high-school campus police in Suburbia, Texas. Why are there police stationed at suburban high schools? Because public schools are now a high-security environment, or at least many of them are intended to be. That is true not only of big cities, where the architecture of public schools is, not coincidentally, penal; public schools far and wide across the fruited plain get the metal-detectors-and-men-with-guns treatment.
Maybe you think that is appropriate. Maybe it is. Maybe every nonconforming tube of outlaw Pepsodent seized by TSA agents is in reality a blow against al-Qaeda, and maybe bright-orange plastic squirt-guns really are a menace to police officers rolling through the malls of America in armored vehicles. But you cannot very well go actively cultivating an atmosphere of paranoia and then pronounce yourself surprised by all the paranoia in the air.
#share#This is an age of overreaction.
It is, unhappily, also an age of race-hustling and grievance-mongering. Thank goodness that felonious Pop-Tart in Maryland was one of the strawberry-flavored ones with rainbow sprinkles and not brown sugar/cinnamon or marshmallow hot chocolate or another of the flavors of color, or we’d be having a national discussion about white-frosting privilege.
Of course it is the very same self-satisfied lifestyle liberals who want to send your toddler to Gitmo for playing with a cap gun who are so theatrically appalled at what happened to Mohamed. The structures of paranoia that have been so assiduously fortified around our schools are there for a purpose, and that purpose is political: to immerse young people in a culture in which NRA literature is samizdat but how-to-fellate-your-friends literature is mandatory, where whitewashed Islamic studies are part of the standard curriculum and Christian prayer groups are verboten. The paranoia is intentional, it is cultivated with exquisite care — but it isn’t supposed to inflict collateral damage on bespectacled young men named Ahmed Mohamed. Thus, the presidential intervention, etc.
Ahmed Mohamed was mistreated by imbeciles, and he’ll be famous for it, for 15 Warholian minutes, and then again for a 30-second spot when he graduates in a few years and goes off to MIT or wherever. The fact is that he is not worse off because his name is Mohamed, but better off: Nobody would be paying attention otherwise, and he might very well be in jail. Being mistreated by imbeciles is the sine qua non of American public education today, but that fact is of political use only periodically, as in this case.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.
The kid did it on purpose and probably with direction from his dad.
the cops and the school wanted to know the reason the kid was making an electronic suitcase device that had a circuit board attached to a timing device.. It’s not far fetched to think he may have made it there at school or had brought it to school to add more parts and and used as a bomb somewhere else later.. there have been kids a heck of a lot younger than that kid involved with electronic timing devices that did go boom..... better safe than sorry
If somebody is going to spend that much time making a clock for fun then it better have a speaker that randomly says “FASTER!”
If a muslim wants a trip to the White House, then try dressing up as a terrorist and sneak into a dark theater.
Another way to get discriminated against is show up at the airport with lots of box cutters.
That's because it is a clock... similar to the Acurite Intelli-time Model 13003 large LED-display clock. The small green circuit board is similar to PCB layout (Figure 2) in ElecCircuit's Cheap Digital time clock.
The clock was crudely disassembled and the parts put into a small Vaultz pencil case, shaped like a briefcase. The power transformer is laying loose on its side with AC contacts exposed (hazard!). The battery clip on the left is for a 9V battery backup of the time when the power cord is unplugged. And with the display inside the case, the clock would be useless unless the case were opened exposing hazardous AC voltage connections to the transformer.
Ahmen (or Ahmed) then took the device to school and pulsed the system in a quick and dirty effort to use a suspicious and electronic-looking thing with wires showing to provoke official school reaction, which then would be reported and denounced by pro-islamist groups, desensitizing and weakening school profiling against islamoterrorism. According to fifth-column media reports, the kid plugged it in during English class, a bizarre move that would alert any responsible teacher.
This kid and his father should be severely interrogated to extract some real answers.
Sorry, but that first name is anathma to me.
No other way to put it. The man was evil.
Just plain evil.
Because they are. The fact is if they REALLY thought it was a bomb they didn’t do any of the things you should do (evacuate, don’t touch it, bring the bomb squad, etc etc). So they clearly didn’t think it was a bomb, and yet they decided to kerfuffle like they thought it was a bomb. Why call the cops on something you apparently don’t actually think is a bomb? Why arrest the kid for something you apparently don’t actually think is a bomb? it’s just a whole lot of silly overreaction to no purpose.
The kid made a fake bomb just to embarrass the school etc.
I think the school and the cops figured out immediately that it was not a bomb but was meant to frighten them and get a lot of attention when it was determined not to be one.
That is a crime and that is why they detained him.
RE: The kid made a fake bomb just to embarrass the school etc.
Have they analyzed the contraption he made yet?
Muslim Dry Run With Fake Briefcase Bomb Get’s Victim Status
Look, whites can’ dance usually and Middle Easterners into Islam tend to be terrorist often enough. So why overlook the obvious.
Kids have from all places been getting into trouble for flag T-shirts, other electronic stuff and how many get invited to the White House?
RE: Apparently no Screen, but some kind of ticking noise maker.
So, how can one tell time then? (that is, if he calls it a clock).
You're either a muslim or an American. You cannot be both.
And the last we'll hear about him is when one of his "clocks" goes off and kills more Americans.
“If they were so concerned it was a bomb, they would have evacuated the school and sent in the Bomb Ordinance team. That proves the school was absolutely stupid.”
Because the Cops knew the kid was pulling their, and the school’s, chain. He made a fake bomb, and they knew it. Use your head. You don’t make fake bombs if you are a Muslim kid going to school a few days after 9/11, and showing it to a 2nd teacher when you don’t get the reaction you were expecting from the 1st one, so that it would eventually gain the desired media attention. It’s not the school that is stupid. Look in a mirror.
RE: You’re either a muslim or an American. You cannot be both.
How would this sentence sound like : You’re either a [fill in the blanks — Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, etc.] or an American. You cannot be both.
Someone here observed that the PC board looked like it was taken from a "regular" clock.
Local radio here in the Upstate, SC was reporting this morning that local news in the TX area where this occurred is giving more details to this incident. Supposedly, the kid had it plugged in to an outlet in his English class, although he was supposed to have brought it to school to show his science teacher. During English class, the “alarm” went off, thus causing quite the disruption. From there, supposedly, the boy was “passive, aggressive” when questioned by the administration; he was vague. It’s because of his non-specific answers to the questioning that law enforcement was contacted.
That’s what was discussed this morning; I’ve not followed up myself to any local TX reporting on this.
Islamic doctrine is seditious to the US Constitution. The other creeds, not so much.
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