“A perfect shitstorm of Islamaphobia”
Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:15 am
http://www.pixable.com/article/ahmed-mo ... re=twitter
Texas 9th Grader Ahmed Mohamed Arrested For Bringing Homemade Clock To School Teachers Thought Was A Bomb
by Mitchell Friedman
Associate Editor
Posted on September 16, 2015, 8:18 AM
14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed built a digital clock and brought it to school to show his engineering teacher. Ahmed can also build radios and repair go-karts, according to the Dallas News, but you can’t bring a go-kart to class.
Seeing the clock — a panel of circuitry with the time on a digital display placed within a latched case — his engineering teacher told him, in Ahmed’s words:
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice. I would advise you not to show any other teachers.”
That advice ended up prophetic as the 14-year-old inventor, eager to show off the skills he learned in robotics club as a middle schooler, would find himself led by the principal and a police officer to a room with four more officers where he was interrogated, searched and finally arrested.
Wired calls the situation “a perfect shitstorm of Islamaphobia” (before explaining how to make Ahmed’s simple clock, which Ahmed put together in nearly 20-minutes).
Ahmed kept the clock in his bag until it beeped during English class, and his teacher “complained,” according to the Dallas News. “Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward,” and she told him it looked like a bomb. She kept the invention, and soon Ahmed found himself in a room with police.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” recalls Ahmed.
“‘I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
To which the officer responded, “It looks like a movie bomb to me.”
Ahmed left school at 3 p.m. in handcuffs, led to a juvenile detention center for fingerprints and to meet his parents. He didn’t go to jail. The principal gave him a three day suspension.
Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, had this to say:
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind. But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
A cousin of Ahmed and fellow participant in middle school robotics, 15-year-old Muram Irbahim felt rattled. “It just shocked me that people could do this to him,” she said. “He’s a 14-year-old boy and he’s a genius.”
For their part, the police didn’t think they had all the information on the device. Police spokesman James McLellan told the Dallas News, “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb. He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.
It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in the a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
As the Council on American-Islamic Relations investigates the case, online support for Ahmed takes the form of #IstandwithAhmed and #helpAhmedmake.