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."

Comments

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[CRCulver]

When Muslims acted as a political bloc, the overwhelming majority of political interactions were positive.

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.

An honest and comprehensive reading of history simply does not support the proposition that Muslims are a sleeping mass of West-hating, xenophobic barbarians, waiting for the right moment to cleanse the world of infidels.

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.