Ahmed’s Clock in the Age of Grievance-Mongering: Muslim Nerd Kids In an Atmosphere of Paranoia

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.

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.

No one ever said they thought it was a bomb. From the start it was considered and treated as a bomb hoax.

On another thread someone mentioned that the kid had a history of making things like this. So the likelyist explanation is that the school decided to “teach him a lesson” by calling in the cops without thinking through the possibility of where it could all go ...

An old axiom.

Hindsight is better than Foresight.

Hence the derision and the derogatory remarks about the school officials. Consider what happens when there is a tragedy with a crowd stampede. If a false alarm, later,it is easy to castigate persons who rush for the exit. At the time the people simply did not have the information. The danger was perceived as real.

The wiseacres sit comfortably at their computer and pontificate ad nauseum. Catch them in a confined space with what the teacher faced, buzzer and all, then see what they would do.

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.

Earlier accounts say he showed it to his Engineering class instructor first, who advised him not to show it to anyone else. If that's the case, the he apparently set this up to cause a disruption and insure that it would be seen after having been warned not to.

Or, could the suspicious looking clock incident be some kind of rouse to provoke an “honest dialogue” about”islamophobia”? This tactic is similar to the phony racial incidents perpetrated by BLM types and guilt ridden “privileged” White activists. But such a ploy could not conceivably be thought up by a 14yr old nerdy kid, no matter how smart he is. Quite possibly the father, along with his “home boys” over at CAIR put him up to it? Thoughts?

This whole *clock* thing smells to high heaven.

Too many actions have conveniently come in to place, very fast. Bammy, Zuckerfool, lawsuit, etc.

Clock = Crock

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/education/boy-13-faces-assault-charges-kissing-girl-14-dare/nndNz/

This teen wasn’t charged with assault because he’s a white Christian. He was charged because schools are often run by morons.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/examiner-recommends-school-board-uphold-pop-tart-suspension/

This seven-year-old was not suspended because he’s a white Christian. He was suspended because schools are often run by morons.

I could give a list hundreds of events long of whites and Christians arrested or suspended over stupid little things that should not have been an offense at all. This entitled Muslim, who is pretending he’s being singled out because of racism, is missing the two far more likely explanations preferred under Occam’s razor:

(1) The school administrators were following zero tolerance policies, which forbid common sense, or

(2) The kids set his school up intentionally and acted suspiciously even after one teacher advised him not to show his “clock” around, in order to create a media sensation and then play act as the victim.

B.S. this is deliberate probing by radical Islamists. No 14 year old kid is going to “build a clock” in a briefcase in this day and age, when clock chips half the size of a fingernail and costing pennies have been available for a decade.

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.

I'm not aware of any of those religions being at war with the rest of the world. Any muslim can tell you their first allegiance is to islam. And if they want to be honest, they'll tell you America is the great satan and must be destroyed.

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