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9th-Grader May Face Charges After Homemade Clock Mistaken For Bomb
New submitter bengoerz writes: 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was led away from MacArthur High School in handcuffs and faces possible charges after teachers, school administrators, and police in Irving, Texas mistook his homemade clock for a bomb. The device — a circuit board, power supply, and digital display wired together inside a pencil box — was confiscated by a teacher after the alarm sounded in class. Despite telling everyone who would listen that his device was just a clock, Ahmed was confronted by four police officers, suspended for three days, and threatened with expulsion unless he made a written statement, before eventually being transported to a juvenile detention center to meet his parents.
On one hand I wanted to commend you on your sarcasm but, I'm afraid you may be both dead serious and right. There's a lot of islamophobic stupidity in this country at the moment and it runs deep in all government institutions especially involving police or defense.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
I have thought about it. My conclusion is that if you have to check twice before carrying something harmless around with you then the terrorists have won.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It isn't fear of terrorism that causes this sort of reaction. At least, not directly. I don't think the police or teachers were necessarily worrying themselves that they might get blown up. Rather, it was a fear that - if the clock was a bomb used in a terror attack - THEY WOULD GET BLAMED for not doing something about it earlier. It's the same reason our politicians are so willing to pass the most obscenely unjust laws to chase down criminals: the penalty for not passing the law is disproportionately greater than passing it. If even one crime could have been prevented by the non-existent law (or had the clock been a bomb), far more blame is assigned to the people-of-authority who MIGHT have done something about the crime than to the actual criminal performing the act itself. It's no wonder people over-react in these situations. They aren't worried about being attacked by terrorists; they are worried about being attacked by us.
So if I take a motherboard inside a box to my school for a science project, you are saying everyone should insta-suspect I am carrying a bomb, even though I'm a pure-bred caucasian and my name is John Smith? In the school's defense, there's only one thing you can say: 'MURICA. When you live in the US and your name is Ahmed Mohamed, you have better chances of not being mistaken by a terrorist if you changed your name to Nero Bombmaker.
The ironic thing is that the vast majority of terror attacks on US soil-particularly bombings-have been perpetrated by "pure-bred caucasian John Smiths". McVeigh, Roof, Columbine, Aurora CO, 1996 Olympics, Unabomber, etc. Incidents such as these dwarf the number of incidents perpetrated by Muslims.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yeah.
Brown skin, muslimish-sounding name, Texas... My own first thought was: "Well, at least they didn't just summarily shoot him."
Imagine all the people...