THOUGHTS: Ahmed and his Homemade Clock?!

zohar

Thu, Sep 17 2015, 11:24 pm

The issue is not Islamophobia or racism, but rather it's the no - tolerance policies that are the culprit in this story. The white house did not invite the little kids who got suspended over pop tart gun or drawing a picture of his hero, his uncle who was in the military, with a rifle. No - tolerance policies leaves little room for adults to use their seichel.

JoyInTheMorning

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 5:56 am

The arrest was over the top, once the police had determined that the clock was not a bomb. The suspension is absolutely consistent with policies in which kids are suspended for bringing in water guns.

His engineering teacher told Ahmed not to show the clock to his other teachers, presumably because he could see that it looked like a bomb (it did to me). Ahmed shares some responsibility for not just putting the device in his locker.

What I'm curious about is this: What has happened to other kids over the years who have built projects like this?

imasoftov

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 8:14 am

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

What I'm curious about is this: What has happened to other kids over the years who have built projects like this?

Many of them went on to do something like "invent good things for mankind" (quote from his father)

MagentaYenta

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 12:26 pm

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

...What has happened to other kids over the years who have built projects like this?

The public schools that my kids went to had robotics classes and robotics teams. Kids were making stuff like this all the time. Some get recruited by the engineering department at our local University to work with their robotics teams.

marina

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 2:17 pm

Pretty much what Magenta Yenta said. If they really thought it was a bomb, they would have evacuated, called in a bomb squad, etc.

They either didn't think it was a bomb and just wanted to harass the kid, or they are completely irresponsible with the entire school's safety.

causemommysaid

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 5:23 pm

oliveoil wrote:

and yet even after the police released him, the school maintained his 3 day suspension...

what can I say? They are total morons

MagentaYenta

Fri, Sep 18 2015, 7:30 pm

So now the police chief admits they knew Ahmed didn't make a bomb but they cuffed him and sent him to juvie anyway. This story is from the Huffpo and I will do my best to C&P it here.

ETA: In Texas you can open carry a glock just about anyplace.

Police Knew Ahmed Didn't Have A Bomb, Arrested The Teen Anyway
Sigh.

Sebastian Murdock
Reporter, The Huffington Post

Police in Irving, Texas, now emphasize that they knew 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed hadn't brought a bomb to high school when they slapped cuffs on him and took him to juvenile detention earlier this week.

"The officers pretty quickly determined that they weren't investigating an explosive device," police chief Larry Boyd told MSNBC on Thursday.

Boyd said that Monday's investigation centered on the possibility that the student, who is Muslim, may have brought a "hoax bomb."

It turned out to be a clock.

Ahmed has said he was quite clear about that all along. He told the Dallas Morning News that when he showed his English teacher the clock, she suggested it looked like a bomb.

"I told her, 'It doesn't look like a bomb to me,'" Ahmed said.

In a meeting with the principal, school staff continued to question the ninth-grader. "They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?'" Ahmed told the newspaper.

"I told them no, I was trying to make a clock."

"He said, 'It looks like a movie bomb to me.'"

Still, in speaking to host Chris Hayes, Boyd skirted around apologizing to Ahmed or admitting his officers made a mistake. "With what they had at that time, they made the best decision that they had at that point in time," Boyd said.

The chief isn't the only one declining to apologize. Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne said in a Facebook post Wednesday that police made the right decision in arresting the student.

"We have all seen terrible and violent acts committed in schools," Van Duyne wrote. "Perhaps some of those could have been prevented and lives could have been spared if people were more vigilant."

She later edited the post to remove the above language.

Ahmed's arrest triggered a firestorm on social media, with President Barack Obama himself speaking out in support of the bright science student.

daisy dukes

Sat, Sep 19 2015, 8:11 pm

mille wrote:

I totally agree. It's also such a shame because this kid appears to be a total mench and his family seems really great.

Also worth noting that President Obama tweeted in support of Ahmed and encouraged him to make cool things like that - as well as a NASA Astronaut (who invited him to an upcoming science expo!). Thankfully the media response has been pretty reasonable, that this was a huge overreaction and not simply being cautious. I saw a picture yesterday which had Ahmed and his clock on one side of the picture, and two Texan children on the other side holding actual guns. Let's not try to pretend this is safety - and let's stand up for other minority groups who are needlessly victimized as well. This would have never happened if it were Alex, Howard, Steve, or Billy.

Are you so sure about the bolded? Because it seems as though kids, even white kids, are being punished left and right for every little thing. Except that the media may not be reporting it and the president wouldn't invite the kid to the white house if the kid being punished is white.

Quote:

How Ahmed’s clock became a false, convenient tale of racism:
When is America going to get serious about the problem of white kids getting suspended from school for nothing?
By now you’ve heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed, crowned by the Daily Beast “The Muslim Hero America Has Been Waiting For” after the 14-year-old brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock.
School officials, thinking, as 95% of Americans would, that it kinda looked like a bomb, hauled him out of class. Police put him in handcuffs and, even after the confusion passed, the boy was suspended from school.
That earned Mohamed a planned trip to the White House, a message of support from Hillary Clinton, an offer to stop by Facebook to meet Mark Zuckerberg and an invitation to be an intern at Twitter.

The police overreacted. Yet the device did look like something Ethan Hunt would lob out of a helicopter at the last minute in “Mission: Impossible.” As National Review’s Charles Cooke pointed out on Twitter, the scary-looking tangle of wires “looks a lot more like a bomb than a pop tart looks like a gun.”
Josh Welch, a white Maryland kid with ADHD who was 7 years old when he was kicked out of school for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a pistol and pretending to shoot other students with it, must be puzzled.
Where’s his White House invitation? Where’s his chance to start networking at Facebook? His parents were forced to hire a lawyer and spent a year and a half just trying to get the suspension erased from the kid’s record. They were repeatedly refused.
“I stand with Ahmed, too. But I also stand with Alex Stone,” noted Reason writer Robby Soave. Alex Stone, a 16-year-old white kid from Summerville, SC, wrote a short story in which he imagined using a gun to kill a dinosaur. For this his locker was searched and he was arrested, handcuffed, charged with “disorderly conduct” and suspended from school for three days.
Obviously the White House and Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t be bothered to comment, but you’d think that, at the very least, Stephen King would have sent out a tweet expressing outrage that imagination was being punished.
Nada.
In Dyer County, Tenn., Kendra Turner says she was suspended for saying, “Bless you” after a student sneezed, and that her teacher told her that she would have no “godly speaking in class.”
Modal Trigger
The homemade clock that Ahmed Mohamed brought to school
Photo: AP
A school administrator said, “This was not a religious issue at all, but more of an issue the teacher felt was a distraction in her class.” Uh-huh. School leadership offered no explanation for the photos posted by students that showed “bless you” on a list of expressions banned in the classroom. Turner is still waiting for her call from President Obama.
Are white kids being punished en masse for dopey quasi-infractions because of their race? Of course not. That’s ridiculous.
But it’s equally absurd to suggest that you have to be Muslim, or brown-skinned, or live in Texas, to be subjected to overenthusiastic use of school discipline and police force.
“It never would have happened to a white kid”? It happens to white kids all. The. Time.
The main difference between the Ahmed Mohamed case and the others is that the mainstream media and the leftist point of view it presents just can’t let go of Ahmed. Ahmed is too useful to their narrative to be a one-day story.
That Bristol Palin said on Facebook that President Obama didn’t need to get involved in the situation proved irresistible for the media, which loves to depict America as a bitter standoff between red-state hicks on the one hand and sophisticated members of the cool bicoastal techno-media club on the other.
Let’s just savor for a moment that the musings of the daughter of an unemployed former governor constitute national news. This year the brother of a sitting president made derogatory comments about the leader of the free world and the reaction from the media was crickets.
Malik Obama gets the courtesy of being ignored because he has also said some crazy things. Now imagine Bristol Palin making loony statements. Would the media decline to cover them?
For 14 years and two weeks now, the left has been desperate to find some evidence, any evidence, that Muslims in general are facing deep-seated discrimination because a few Muslims attacked us on 9/11.
That American Muslims have instead mostly been treated with respect and courtesy ought to be a point of pride, but at no point will the left ever say, “Isn’t it great that we’re such a pluralistic and tolerant country?”
The left-led push to turn a man who was, as of 2004, an obscure state senator with no particular accomplishments, into the president four years later, was centrally and crucially about race. Everyone else was being subjected to a bait-and-switch.
Instead of being credited with enlightenment for being the only white-majority country ever to elect a black leader, now we’re told that everything is about racism.

http://nypost.com/2015/09/19/h.....cism/

myself

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 2:25 pm

Ahmed and his family will be moving to Qatar.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-.....87285

morah

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 2:32 pm

I thought at the time (and said so upthread) that the school was right to investigate, as the clock looked suspicious, but the cops overreacted. Well, now they show their true colors. An engineering program in Qatar? Yeah, I don't like the sound of that. Hope somebody investigates this family before they leave.

MagentaYenta

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 3:05 pm

morah wrote:

Why? US citizens leave to get educations with regularity and the converse is also true.

He's a story about his family's immigration to the US.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-.....87285

morah

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 6:06 pm

MagentaYenta wrote:

Why? US citizens leave to get educations with regularity and the converse is also true.

He's a story about his family's immigration to the US.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-.....87285

To Qatar? I don't think so. And we're having a lot of problems with the students we're letting in here on student visas, we should be more selective, especially from certain parts of the world (or better yet, focus on bringing American students up to scratch). I don't trust anything to do with Qatar. And Ahmed's father has a rather interesting history himself. So yes, now that the whole story is out and not just the oppressed Muslim narrative, there should be a little more digging before this kid leaves the country for who knows what is going on at Qatari "engineering school".

MagentaYenta

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 6:30 pm

morah wrote:

I live in a small and very diverse university town with about 50k in population. I just dipped into our graduate census, we currently have almost 3K in international graduate students from Arab nations. We also have 5K in US students who are attending Graduate studies or are on fellowships or cooperative agreements in the middle east.

You can be as paranoid as you wish, these folks are members of my community, some are neighbors, more than a few friends. I will say that our local Suffi community are not spouting jihad (nor are the Imans at two mosques).

Our city also has an academic enrichment with UAE nations for some of our gifted HS students who are interested in medical research, public policy and public planning and large project engineering.

imasoftov

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 8:07 pm

morah wrote:

Hope somebody investigates this family before they leave.

Call the FBI. Let us know how it goes.

33055

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 8:59 pm

Ahmed didn't build a clock. He took apart an existing clock and put it in a pencil box.

Why?

morah

Wed, Oct 21 2015, 9:13 pm

Sorry, not buying it. Kids don't go to the ME to study engineering, they go to study foreign policy or world markets. Serious future engineers who study abroad go to Germany or Japan. And the UAE is not as enlightened as they advertise with their fancy urban development. Try walking around Dubai openly as a Jew and lemme know how that works out. Qatar is a human rights disaster, you cannot take anything they do seriously.

And you may snark about the FBI, but they ought to be on this family's case, especially given dad's shady political connections. But you're right, they won't, because Ahmed is now Obama's little buddy.

ora_43

Fri, Oct 23 2015, 3:34 am

MagentaYenta wrote:

Not all Middle East countries are exactly the same when it comes to terrorism. For example, the UAE is working with America to help stop funding to Afghani terrorists, while Qatar is notorious for funding terrorist groups, including the Al-Nusra front and jihadi groups in Iraq.

And not all Muslim communities are the same when it comes to terrorism, either. So just because Morah is concerned over Qatar - which, again, is blatantly pro-terrorism - doesn't mean she thinks the Suffi Muslims in wherever you live in America are pro-terrorism.

Beyond that, there's also the huge difference between someone coming from a pro-terrorism country, and going to that country. Someone from Qatar had no choice in whether or not to be born in Qatar, and may be completely against their country's record on terrorism. OTOH, someone going to Qatar from the United States had a choice, and apparently decided that support for al-Qaeda, Hamas, and al-Nusra isn't such a bad thing.

I'm not about to call the FBI, but I do find it deeply ironic, and unfortunate, that a family that was so upset over people suspecting terrorism just because they're Muslim is now choosing to move to a terror-supporting state. Ahmed became the poster child for innocent Muslim American kids, then turned around and decided to go live in one of the most anti-American, pro-terror places on earth. It's a shame.

November

Fri, Oct 23 2015, 4:11 am

To me, this whole story smelled of a family that wanted to use victimization to their benefit.

JoyInTheMorning

Sun, Dec 06 2015, 10:27 am

Squishy wrote:

Ahmed didn't build a clock. He took apart an existing clock and put it in a pencil box.

Why?

Yup. He just ripped open a Radio Shack Micronta clock from the 1970s oe 1980s and put it in a box. See http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech.....lves/ .

This was a PR stunt, and many of us fell for it.

Jeanette

Sun, Dec 06 2015, 11:01 am

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

Yup. He just ripped open a Radio Shack Micronta clock from the 1970s oe 1980s and put it in a box. See http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech.....lves/ .

This was a PR stunt, and many of us fell for it.

Yes, he got exactly the reaction he (or rather his father) wanted and probably exceeded his wildest expectations.