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Ahmed Mohamed, His Clock, and the Curious Turn of Events
New submitter poity writes: After the news first broke of the 9th grader getting cuffed for scaring school officials with what turned out to be a digital clock, Ahmed Mohamed has experienced a surge of popular support — hailed as a genius and a hero, with college scholarships, internship offers, and even an invitation to the White House by President Obama himself. Now, amid rumors of possible racial discrimination lawsuits against the school and local police, some people have begun to more deeply scrutinize the details of the case, especially on the tech side with regard to the homemade clock in question. Recently, a writer at the creative site Artvoice posted a remarkable analysis of Ahmed's clock project, which raises new questions about the case and the manner in which people and the media alike have reacted. The linked analysis posits that Ahmed's clock started out as another clock, rather than a box of parts, and Ahmed can be said to have repackaged rather than "invented" a wholly new clock, but acknowledges that "none of us were there and knows what happened."
Every time he was asked about it, he plainly explained it was a clock.
Also, the school indicated they knew it wasn't a bomb, but thought he built it to look like a bomb. They thought he was going to call in a bomb scare later.
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TL;DR: No one ever thought it was an actual bomb.
Long version:
Since no one ever actually thought it was a bomb, the fact that the school and police took no action as if it were a bomb does not somehow "prove" it's racism and/or Islamophobia. That isn't to say one or more of the people involved had something in that vein in their minds, but their lack of treating it as a bomb doesn't demonstrate it, since numerous accounts of this story indicate the school and police never thought it was an actual bomb.
Some people thought it "looked like" a bomb, and wondered why he would bring it to school, because they don't understand why kids who like things like science and electronics do what they do.
And there are laws dealing with what are called "hoax devices". Many people have gotten into trouble for such things before. Hoax device statutes have been around for many, many years, long before 9/11.
Here is the Texas statute:
http://www.statutes.legis.stat...
The only thing that matters in the hoax device statute is intent â" a feature that is not unique. For example, intent matters when someone is killed. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Was it premeditated? That is the difference between someone having done nothing wrong, and murder. And it is interviews and investigations and evidence that determine intent.
Even in the original Dallas Morning News article that broke this story â" before it went viral and Ahmed got invited to the White House, JPL, MIT, got scholarships, and become the hero of Silicon Valley â" the only thing the police officials said was that they knew it wasn't a bomb, that Ahmed never claimed it was anything but a clock, and that they were trying to determine WHY he built and AND brought it to school. Once it was determined there was no intent to alarm, scare, or deceive, it was further determined there was no wrongdoing.
Steve Wozniak got in trouble for using a hoax device (with intent to scare), and was arrested and spent a night in jail. I got in trouble with authority figures â" school, police â" for things similar to what Ahmed did several times, when doing nothing wrong. Maybe a little borderline, maybe a little, "What on earth are you doing?" but not illegal. And frankly, some of those came down only to intent as well.
So this little trope misunderstands what happened. Could racism or Islamophobia been an element in anyone's mind? There is no way to know, as much as people desperately want to come to that conclusion. When people say, "What white kid would have gotten in trouble for doing nothing wrong?"
Plenty. Ignore the title, read the article (for those who haven't already):
https://reason.com/blog/2015/0...
His English teacher overreacted by getting the principal's office involved. The school overreacted by calling the police. The school bears almost all of the responsibility here â" not "post-9/11 America", racism, or police. If the police had not been called, none of this would ever have happened â" and Ahmed wouldn't be a celebrity, either.
When police are called for a situation where any of the parties involved are not in perfect agreement, and there is no controversy, even if nothing illegal occurred, I would submit that there are not many times that results in a more positive outcome. The police are there, in part, to investigate and to determine if there was any wrongdoing, which they did. I wish they would have simply handled it at the school, but what I really wish is that the school would not have called the police in the first place.
Steve Wozniak actively tried to build a fake bomb at school. When the principal found it ticking, he ran with it to the football field and ripped the wires off. Wozniak started laughing when he heard it, but they sent him to juvy. While there, he taught the other prisoners how to "disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them."
The principal in Woz's case deserves real credit for risking his life to save kids from a bomb. Principal today? Not so much.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This happens to non-muslims too. White teenage girls from MIT.
Anti-muslim hate crimes make up 11% of our religiously motivated hate crimes, but they make up 0.8% of our population.
And yes, that's a decimal place before the "8".
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a kid I did take apart a old, large TV, and there was sparks, shocks and the smell of burning flesh even though it was unplugged (capacitors...)
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And the Danish cartoons and the cartoons drawn in Garland.
You can call me Islamaphobic, but that doesn't mean there aren't muslims willing to kill me over a cartoon.
As far as Europeans go, they're not nearly the liberal hippie types that Americans like to think they are. There are plenty of people we'd classify as rednecks over there, there's a very racist and homophobic segment all over, etc. Generally Europe has seen to not have had a big race problem in the past because the countries were very homogenous for a very long time (but always an underlying anti-semetic and anti Roma nastiness).
This. Having spent lots of time on both continents, I have to say that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, by which I mean prevailing attitudes among the educated, genteel middle class, not the right-wing fringe. Dog-whistle ideas like "cultural identity" and "tradition" are widely accepted without any critical thinking at all.
Just so the world knows: Syrians are not Arabs. Arabicized maybe, but they are not Arabs. You may get that impression from the (Arabicized) names but that just comes from the fact that a bunch of Arabs went-out conquering and converting people (at sword at first) to Islam, taking Arabic with them. They did not, in fact, actually absorbe those populations or magically replace their genes or other identities, however: Syrians are mixed bunch, but more Turkic in some ways; a bunch are probably more related to Jews than anyone from Saudi Arabia (don't say that openly to them though), and to "Byzantines" (eastern Romans, themselves a mixed bunch and only "Roman" much later in their history). The Turks (and they) often co-identify and not always religiously, but in socio-ethnicity, and that would actually put them at direct odds with Arabs since the latter were forcibly subjugated by the Ottoman empire, though both were Islamic. Just a hint: stop referring to the middle east as "Arab", and the locals (of many identitites and histories, largely without actually being descendents of the same people) will really appreciate it.
If that were the case, the teacher, principal, superintendent and chief of police would be screaming from the rooftops that Ahmed had joked about making a bomb, or otherwise led people to believe a bunch of wires and circuits was a bomb.
They're not. Which means you don't have a question, you have a non-sequitur.
Just because there wasn't outright slaughter does not make for positive interaction. Freedom of religion inherently involves being allowed to build new places of worship for one's religion or renovate older ones. It involves being allowed to invite others to one's faith and to display symbols of one's faith (like a cross on churches). These things were missing in Muslim-ruled states for most of the history of Islam.
Even those Jews from Spain were treated unfairly. They may have been accepted in Muslim countries, and they were certainly fleeing a horrid Reconquista, but in their new homelands they faced a new set of challenges such as being forced to live in districts set aside for them instead among the general population, being forbidden from riding a horse, and so on.
If you want to be taken seriously here, you need to stop deliberately misinterpeting those to whom you respond. I never said that Muslims are xenophobic or barbaric. And I would suspect that for the majority of Muslims in states with historically Christian and/or Jewish minorities, they tried to explain the discriminatory strictures placed on religious minorities away. Even today you can hear, "Oh, it's just to keep the peace", or "They can believe what they want as long as they don't seek to convert Muslims", or "They just need to pay this large tax because we won't let them serve in the army". I don't believe that most Muslims think very actively about eradicating the infidel. However, the end result for non-Muslim religions in the "Muslim world" was still the same: demographic decline, political disempowerment, and a whole host of laws that applied to them and not to Muslims.