Posted on 10/16/2015 7:37:34 PM PDT by ScottWalkerForPresident2016
A Texas teen’s journey from handcuffs to presidential handshakes reminds us how far some remain from understanding this nation’s founding ideals, a lesson a former president – and inventor – might help us understand even as 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed visits the White House at the invitation of President Obama.
A month ago, the Irving, Texas, high school student was arrested for demonstrating ingenuity while Muslim by inventing a clock. Like Ahmed, Thomas Jefferson was an inventor. Coincidentally, he also helped imagine our concept of religious freedom.
Jefferson, like the Texas teen, also loved a new gadget.
In 1806, while a second-term president, Jefferson tinkered with U.S. patent-holder Charles Willson Peale’s new machine, a device Jefferson once said he, “could not live without,” an apparatus designed to make an exact copy of handwritten correspondence, called the Polygraph. He proudly wanted to craft a version “entirely mounted in silver,” as a present for the ruler of Tripoli. The United States had just concluded a five-year undeclared war with the North African kingdom.
Our peace treaty with Tripoli declared: “...the Government of the United States of America has in itself no character of enmity against the Laws, Religion, or Tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims].”
But 209 years later, some Texans vehemently disagree, leading to the unwarranted arrest and unlawful interrogation of Ahmed on Sept. 16, when he brought his new invention to school to impress his teachers.
The nifty clock invented by the young member of the robotics club prompted false charges he had created a “hoax bomb,” an ordeal that made the student feel like a “criminal” and a “terrorist.”
This is not the first assault on Muslim civil liberties in Texas this year, and it won’t be the last. At Texas Muslim Capitol Day in January, a heckler seized the organizer’s microphone, shouting: “I want to inspire Americans against this and proclaim for Jesus Christ and not for their god, Allah.”
One would think from such talk that American civil liberties only belonged to Christians, a proposition Thomas Jefferson rejected. A few months after penning the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he took note of the English philosopher John Locke’s inclusive words: “neither Pagan nor Mahometan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.”
Hatred of Islam at the national level is not new, either. At a town hall meeting in September, a supporter of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed President Obama a Muslim, asking when “we” could “get rid of them.” Trump’s birther-mania had finally come home to roost, conflated with his Islamophobia.
But the accusation, which Trump declined to correct, promotes the fallacy that Muslim citizens are un- or even anti-American, a precedent fellow GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson appeared to second even more recently when he mistakenly claimed Islam not “consistent” with the Constitution. Unchallenged, this same toxic fusion of racial and religious bigotry resulted in Ahmed Mohamed’s wrongful imprisonment. Like Obama, whose father was Kenyan, the Texan teen inventor’s parents hale from Africa; but, unlike the president, he and his family are Muslims.
Jefferson, like Obama, once was a victim of a presidential smear campaign, one that condemned him as an “infidel,” a word that in the 18th century meant not just unbeliever but Muslim.
But, would Jefferson, ever intrigued by novel machines, have taken a stand with Ahmed, as Obama did when he tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed”?
Alas, Jefferson, who also invented a clock – in the form of a spherical sundial - forced his young male slaves the same age as Ahmed to work 14-hour-days in his nail factory. This gave the Founder his leisure to invent.
At Monticello, a replica of Jefferson’s sundial still may be seen, but the sun has set on the enslavement of children because of the color of their skin.
Using the Polygraph to write five years before his death, Jefferson, our first “infidel” president, championed the rights of Muslim citizens, writing that he intended his Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom “to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination,” wherein he wrote these immortal words: “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions.”
This is a powerful American precedent for those who dare to defend the equality of all our hopeful, ingenious children, regardless of race or religion.
The Muslim kid didn’t invent anything. He took the innards out of a digital clock and stuck them in a case.
And that’s just the beginning of the idiocies of this article.
Nonsense, pure and unadulterated crap. Every premise is wrong. How can this buffoon post on the Hill?
Thomas Jefferson must be turning in his grave!
He didn't "invent" anything. He took apart a Micronta clock and put it in a pencil case. The kid is an idiot. He has produced nothing which required any creativity, and he misled people into thinking he had done something that takes more than 20 seconds.
Seriously, there is a video on Youtube where someone takes apart this same clock, and puts it in a pencil box. It took 20 seconds.
Here is a snippet of that video.
It would be difficult to think of another story where the attention thrown on an individual was more unwarranted and just plain stupid than this Clock Boy lunacy.
And, of course, this indentity politics nonsense is just the sort of nothing story Obama would latch onto and pretend it has some deep meaning, and that it illustrates how racist and Islamophobic the US is, in his sick, twisted, Third World view of the USA.
Typical for a feckless fool on a hill, unworthy to hold that office.
And this is one of those times that Thomas Jefferson was just simply wrong.
This is just nonsensical Liberal thinking, and does not, and cannot work out in practice.
Islam does not accept the concept of Equality. Jefferson attempts to force another religion to operate in accordance with a Christian idea, but it was so ubiquitous in Jefferson's environment, that he conceives of the concept of equality as a universal principle.
It is not. Islam utterly rejects it.
Again, more of Jefferson's egalitarian nonsense. He obviously didn't believe his own press releases or he would have freed his own slaves.
Had the school not had him arrested, we would have never heard of him.
When I was his age, I was building a Heathkit amp,fm tuner and CB radio.
My geek friends were doing the same. We weren’t praised as inventors, but we did learn some basic electronics.
What a steaming pile. Not worth a response.
The main takeaway here is that The Hill will publish anything and can be taken with a grain of salt by sensible people.
She’s a muslim apologist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Spellberg
Denise A. Spellberg (born c. 1958) is an American scholar of Islamic history. She is an associate professor of history and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Spellberg holds a BA from Smith College (1980) and a PhD (1989) from Columbia University.
Spellberg is the author of Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘A’isha Bint Abi Bakr, a widely cited work on the portrayal of Aisha in Islamic tradition. In particular, Spellberg shows how later commentators reinterpreted Aisha’s role at the Battle of Camel (656,) where she rode her camel into battle against Ali but stayed inside the litter with the curtains closed, as an argument that women should never participate in public affairs.[
In 2008 Spellberg was involved in a controversy over Sherry Jones’ historical novel The Jewel of Medina. Random House, which intended to publish the novel later that year, had sent Spellberg galley proofs, hoping for a publishable comment. Spellberg sharply criticized the novel from a historical perspective, and also reportedly told Random House publishing the book might result in violence by radical Muslims. Subsequently, Random House indefinitely postponed publication, citing concerns about violence from extremists.[3]
Asra Nomani wrote about the events in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, in which she characterized Spellberg as “the instigator of the trouble”.[3] In the wake of Nomani’s article, a number of publications printed pieces criticizing Spellberg’s actions as tantamount to advocating censorship.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
Spellberg responded in the Wall Street Journal, contesting Nomani’s characterization of her as the “instigator” of the book’s cancellation. She wrote that she was not advocating censorship, but rather offering her professional assessment of the book and a warning about the potential reaction from some Muslims
...In 2013, Spellberg published Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. The book discusses a copy of the Qur’an owned by Thomas Jefferson as well as Jefferson’s views on Islam, arguing that his vision for religious freedom in the United States specifically included Muslims...
Thank you. No wonder nothing made sense. From one false premise to another in such rapid succession, you would think she would loose her balance. A fool never admits to anything.
[and inventor]
What a joke. The author is an idiot. He didn’t “invent” anything.
Animated jpg? Really cool!
[you and Austin]
s/b “And Austin”
The author is part of the political theater that was this boys “clockmaking.”
It was all planned in advance — the clock, the arrest, the media campaign, the immediate invitation to the White House. The police and teachers of Irving TX were stupid dupes in the bit of theater.
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