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

I liked the cartoon that read:

[The Real Dr John]

Child invents Islamophobia detector.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[dsmatthews9379]

From what I can see there is nothing special about him or what he did, he is just some cheeky kid who used a very naive way of getting attention and it got out of hand. All this talk of discrimination etc. seems like a beat-up and the poor kid will pay the price in the long run for all the manipulating adults have done to politically capitalise on his prank. Now he has the entire world watching him and expecting to live up to their expectations when there is no solid evidence he is gifted at all.

How is he going to have a normal and healthy adolescence with that weight on his shoulders? How many children pushed into the limelight crashed and burned as young adults when reality came along and burst their artificially inflated egos? How is messing with children like that in any way ethical regardless of the cause you think it is in aid of?

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[thinkwaitfast]

This happens to non-muslims too. White teenage girls from MIT.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Rei]

He also said in an interview he only spent about 20 minutes on it, and it was anything but one of his best "inventions" (something that a number of other people in interviews have mentioned).

The kid is 14. And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for? Someone who looked at the clock picture and automatically assumed, "I bet a 14-year-old made that circuitboard"?

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Anonymous Coward]

And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for?

He was probably writing for someone with reading comprehension. He doesn't criticize the kid at a for silk-screening or not, but simply points out that most hobbyists do not silkscreen their boards, especially hand drawn ones (as opposed to cheap boardhouses that deal with only electronic formats now). It is just a big hint that the board is not a hobbyist's, d.i.y. board.

Plenty of people learned electronics as a young teenager or even younger, and were making their own boards. I remember getting the supplies to do so for $10 from Radioshack decades ago, and it is even easier and cheaper online, with far more instructions and tutorials available. If I hear a teenager say they made an electronic clock, I would assume they did make their own boards, because it is a common project to do...

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[Darinbob]

How is it anti Jewish or anti Christian to point out that all witches must be killed? Anything anti semetic in pointing out that every living thing in Jericho was commanded to be killed, man, woman, child, animals. Or the law in Deuteronomy that if you're caught raping a virgin you must pay her father and marry her? And also in Deuteronomy, if someone convinces one of your family to follow another god, you should kill them? If everyone followed the letter of their religious texts, I'd be pretty afraid of Jews and Christians also.

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).

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Darinbob]

He did exactly what most of us slashdotters did as kids; take stuff apart to see how they work and put them back together in different ways. Of course it wasn't an invention, he said it only took him a few moments.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Darinbob]

Half a bomb is a stupid way to phrase things. The clock before it was taken apart was therefore also half a bomb. Radio Shack before it went bankrupt could be classified as a Do-It-Yourself half-a-bomb factory. It's not even a trigger yet, it's just a clock with minimal changes to put it into a pencil box (looks cooler, like something maybe from a really bad spy movie where you have to cut the red wire, no the green one).

Did he intend it to look like a bomb? I don't know. It does not look like one to me. It did NOT look like a bomb to the police or teachers either or they would panicked, maybe have an evacuation drill, and they would not have kept a possible-bomb around. What they thought was that the kid intended it to be a hoax bomb, which the kid denied, and they arrested him and against Texas law did not have his parents present. The school wanted him to sign a "confession" without his parents present.

It sounds like a big case of the police and school assuming the kid did something wrong, not having any solid proof of any of it, then just wanting to send a big message with the hand cuffs and perp walk. The kid is supposed to learn the lesson to not stand out, keep curiosity in check, go play football when the urge to study strikes. All hail zero tolerance, keeping our kids safe and stupid for a decade.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Beeftopia]

From what I can see there is nothing special about him or what he did, he is just some cheeky kid who used a very naive way of getting attention and it got out of hand. All this talk of discrimination etc. seems like a beat-up and the poor kid will pay the price in the long run for all the manipulating adults have done to politically capitalise on his prank.

I didn't get the impression that the boy is cheeky or that this was a prank.

It just seems like he's a precocious kid interested in how things work and he wanted to show one of his teachers. Unfortunately, teachers' detectors are up for school violence (remember the child who was penalized for chewing his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun?) and the rise of radical Islam (Islamic gunmen attack the "Draw The Prophet" 40 minutes away in Garland Texas) resulted in this situation.

It's a tricky situation. However, calling the cops seems slightly absurd. They didn't think it was a bomb by the fact they didn't evacuate the premises and bring a bomb robot to blow it up. If the authorities find a credible threat, they bring in a bomb robot and blow up whatever the threat is. That didn't happen.

As far as taking things apart and putting them back together, Henry Ford did that sort of thing. This might have been simpler, but the boy correctly put it together in a different way.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[TapeCutter]

While Ahmed may have been innocent (but that's not been proved as yet [my emphasis]

Somehow I missed this gem in my first reply? Did you realise that you are now so scared of terrorists that you are willing to throw out the Magna Carta? Is that how you "defend your freedoms"? - by capitulating to their demands?

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[MrNaz]

As a Muslim, I can categorically state that anyone who thinks that we are required by our religion to kill or convert "infidels" has never actually met one of us, and only knows about us from Fox News. Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.

Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident. The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.

You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[CRCulver]

Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident.

Oh, there has been plenty of incident. To mention one thing that has been on my mind with the war in Syria of late, one thing that struck me traveling there before the war is that even under the "anti-fundamentalist" Assad regime, Christians were forbidden by law from putting crosses on their places of worship or inviting Muslims to their faith, while among Muslims it was completely allowed to engage in da'wah among the Christian population. As I would later discover, this discrimination in law holds for most Muslim states.

I wouldn't disagree that most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are peaceful in individual interaction, and I'm certainly grateful for the immense hospitality I have received across the Muslim world from the Maghreb to southeast Asia. But when this population acts as a political bloc, I don't believe that the outcome is as pleasant for non-Muslim minorities as you claim.

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[Moridineas]

Fox News may accuse us of being ignorant and intolerant people, but history and fact does not support that assertion.

Citation? Has "Fox News" really said that?

Our religion has a 1,400 year history of living side by side with Christians, Jews, fire worshippers, and atheists, even within the borders of Muslim nations, without incident

Look, in general I am a defender of Islam. I don't believe that Islam requires aggression any more than Christianity requires crusades. If you want to look for genocide, forced conversion, and slavery, you need look no further than Christian Europe. However, I don't really find your statement above to be accurate either.

Historically, in territories controlled by Muslim polities, religious minorities have not fared particularly well. Jewish massacres in particular have happened like clockwork across Islamdom. Religious minorities were often forced to wear special identifying clothes. Christians were not allowed to build churches or even ring bells, historically (and in the present day in many areas). In every Islamic state that I know of--from Spain to India--religious minorities had few (if any) legal rights and were required to pay large taxes. If this sounds a lot like how the Nazis treated minorities, you would be correct. The Nazis of course were European Christians, so don't take this as a defense of Christianity.

Whether you're talking about the non-Muslim slaves of the Ottoman Empire (and the conversion of so many churches into Mosques--most notably the Hagia Sophia / Aya Sofya), the jihads against the "kafirs" of Kafiristan in Afghanistan (Kafiristan means land of the infidels, today pleasingly renamed to Nuristan, the land of enlightenment, after their forced conversion in the 19th century), or any number of similar clashes, it's very hard to make the case as Islam as a positive force for religious minorities. It's also incredibly ironic that you mention the Zoroastrians--who you insultingly call "fire worshippers"--as an example of Islam's tolerance. The Zoroastrians, one of the oldest religious on the planet, have probably fared worse than any other minority group under Islamic rule.

The wars in the middle east today are instigated by the idiots kept in power by foreign aid money. How many Muslims do you think actually support Assad? How many of us support the Saudi royals? Saddam Hussein? These people got into power by playing the game that landed them military support allowing them to seize power. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the barbaric idiocy demonstrated by these people, and that's to say nothing of the rabid dogs in ISIS.

Ridiculous assertions. You are correct when you state there is plenty of foreign interference in the Middle East and foreign interference has almost certainly been a negative for the vast majority of residents of the Middle East. However, the House of Saud rose as a fanatical fundamentalist regime aligned with Wahhabism. It rose with popular support. Today might be a different question, but I see no great satisfaction coming out of Sunni Saudi Arabia (barring the Shia minority areas). Assad and Saddam--Assad remains popular amongst his people, and his father--like Saddam--arose out of a period of Arab nationalism, secularism, and socialism. This is the Baathist movement (one of the main founders of which was a Christian, incidentally). Baathism was perhaps the dominant and most popular ideology across much of the Middle East for much of the 20th century.

You're judging 1.5 billion people, who collectively have a one and a half millennium long history of tolerance and acceptance, by the actions of a ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims as much as they are by the rest of the world. That strikes me as rather, well, ignorant and intolerant.

A ragtag bunch of barbarians who are opposed by Muslims? You must be talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakis

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.

Re: I liked the cartoon that read:

[CRCulver]

[citation needed]. Also, this and this kinda ruins your "Muslims hate Jews" narrative.

Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It only proves the OP's point: "Like all non-Muslims, Jews ... faced other restrictions in clothing, horse riding, army service etc." (I found this informative, I thought that the horse-riding restriction was only imposed on refugee Jews in the Maghreb.)

And you completely skipped over the OP's mention that Christians were forbidden from ringing bells and the conversion of churches into mosques by force. That is awfully disingenous. If you sincerely want to defend Islam against critiques that may be unfair, then you still have to acknowledge and rebut all attacks. Remaining silent as you did here really only weakens your own cause.

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[Sri Ramkrishna]

It was a fucking clock. His engineering teacher could have verified it. Second, if they were really concerned why the fuck was the bomb squad and fire dept not called? They kept that kid for two class periods interrogating him without a lawyer and his parents. The principal trying to force him to write some kind of written confession. Again, without his parents. Do you think that was reasonable? Jeezus.

Also speculating what the kid was up to? Really? Why not just give him the benefit of the doubt?

Re:I liked the cartoon that read:

[is as us Infinite]

I'll be honest, my reading is that he's writing it to deflate the groundswell of support for Ahmed. He straw-man's Ahmed's statement that he invented it, as you describe, and then goes on to talk about how the teachers actually weren't responding absurdly. It's an article intended to give points of support to those who want to argue against the commonly expressed opinion that Ahmed was targeted absurdly and unfairly. It does this partly by whittling away at Ahmed's 'credibility' as a young inventor.

It's definitely contrary to my viewpoint, but I think that's what's going on here.

Genius or not

[Dorianny]

He is being hailed as a symbol against prejudice and suspicion. Whether he is a genius or not makes absolutely no difference in this case.

Re:Genius or not

[thakalas]

Whether he is a genius or not makes absolutely no difference in this case.

Actually it does. If all he did was rip the guts out of a working clock and stuff it in a box, he was probably trying to provoke exactly this reaction. Considering some of the other information (the cop saying he thought that's who it was) it's likely that this is the dad trying to start crap. Sounds like small town infighting in a rather large town.

Re: Genius or not

[AK Marc]

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.

Re: Genius or not

[AK Marc]

But every story has two sides.

The part where the school claims they thought it was a bomb, so they left the bomb in his possession while they waited for the cops, and didn't evacuate the school? The side where the police claim it was a bomb, so they didn't call the bomb squad?

When one side is obviously full of lies, waiting for them to refine their lies to something that's not explicitly contradictory isn't "fair", it's stupid.

About over-reactive police state, not genius

[gurps_npc]

It doesn't matter if he bought the clock and broke it, rather than 'made it'.

He's a 13 year old kid, not an engineer.

This story is about a huge over-reaction by fools that can't tell the difference between "Should be questioned/looked into" and "Should be arrested, suspended, and punished".

We have to start holding government employees to a HIGHER standard than they hold non-employees. We should never punish regular citizens, let alone children for appearing to have committed a crime - just for actually doing it. But at the same time we need to start punishing police, principals, and similar people for APPEARING to have committed crimes. That's the only way to stop government over-reach.

My view of this

[poity]

Submitter here. Since partisan accusations were quickly thrown when I mentioned this elsewhere, I'd like to just clarify my own view regarding this case: I think Ahmed didn't deserve to be handcuffed, he very clearly wasn't a danger to anyone. I also think he didn't deserve to be glorified and cast as a heroic genius with all this acclaim in the media, as the new evidence suggests.

My takeaway? Reality is complex (in this case perplexingly so), and the media doesn't do well with complexities.

Re:My view of this

[ConfusedVorlon]

Clearly he didn't 'invent' the clock - but I don't think anyone really thought he did.

After all - we already have clocks.

He likes to tinker, and he calls the result his 'inventions'. Not the most nuanced use of language - but he is 13.

Whether he just took apart and repackaged an existing clock, or did something more technically challenging, your implied charge of misleading us over his 'invention' seems rather ungenerous in spirit.

Re:My view of this

[FranTaylor]

What I don't like is the fact that Ahmed Mohamed didn't accomplish anything worth of presidential attention

that's completely irrelevant, the point is to show the country that we should cherish the experimenter spirit.

Re:My view of this

[Mars Saxman]

There's no new evidence here - it was obvious the instant we saw the photo of his project that he'd repackaged the guts of some old AC clock! Good for you that you figured out exactly which one it was, but really, so what? I worked on similar projects when I was his age. You have to start somewhere, and casemodding a piece of old garage-sale junk is a totally reasonable project for a 14-year-old newbie.

We aren't making a fuss over him because he's an extraordinary genius; rather, we're making a fuss over him because he's just an ordinary kid who *ought* to have been treated with ordinary respect, and we're trying to make up for the unforgivably shitty dumbass bullshit he's been subjected to.

And really, it's less about him than it is about all the other kids like him: the message is "don't let those fucknuts in Texas scare you, smart young Muslim inventor kids; America at large thinks you're cool".

Article misses the point

[kamath.ben]

Nobody got mad because his "invention" was being discredited, or even really cared if a 14 year old claimed he invented something he merely assembled. The reaction to show encouragement and support was to counteract the fact that this young boy might think the whole country would consider him a terrorist suspect for showing interest in electronics. I absolutely don't care if he is a boy wonder or not, lets not treat kids as terrorists because they are brown and like engineering.

Passive agressive accusation

[DerekLyons]

Gotta love the passive agressive accusations in the second article - "I don't mean to accuse him of being a terrorist, but wasn't he acting suspicious, isn't all this a little funny, isn't it kinda like he was a terrorist?".

So let's just say that this article is true...

[bmo]

... and go with what happened.

They didn't evacuate the school, or even the room. They didn't call the bomb squad. They did everything *but* treat the purported "possible bomb" as a bomb.

It wasn't about whether it was a bomb or not, it was about humiliating the brown kid.

If it was a bomb, and it did explode and take out the administration office, Uncle Chuck Darwin would have been smiling. But it wasn't, so it's not even close to a Darwin Award, but rather a damn good example of straight-out racism.

--
BMO

Re:So let's just say that this article is true...

[phantomfive]

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.

Full of bad reporting

[bangular]

While I generally support him, the media has been TERRIBLE at reporting this story. The LA Times had a very popular article that kept comparing him to Steve Jobs. JOBS!??! Don't they mean Woz?! The police also release misleading photos making it look like it was the size of a suitcase (it was waaaay smaller than that). I guess once the mass media gets their hands on something their only concern is ad clicks...

Re:Full of bad reporting

[circletimessquare]

the woz comparison is better than you know:

"TIL Steve Wozniak put a fake bomb in a locker during high school and spent the night in a juvenile detention center where he taught prisoners how to disconnect the ceiling fan wires and connect them to bars so it would shock people on touch"

https://www.reddit.com/r/today...

including this tidbit:

The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off.

woz made an actual fake bomb intended to frighten. in today's day and age he would be locked up for life

ps: the comparison to jobs, even though less valid than woz, still has the slightly valuable point that jobs was an arab:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Jobs's biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (b. 1931), was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Syria.[9]

the added poignancy right now being the way syrian refugees are being treated by racists and bigots in europe right now

No one ever thought it was an actual bomb

[daveschroeder]

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.

Re:Genius ? Really ? No, Sir.

[dpidcoe]

At best, from the picture, the "clock" seems more to be a commercial product hacked up in a different case. Why would he add 2 source of power (9V battery + main) ? Why do this on 2 different boards linked up by ribbon cables ?

You answered your own question with your first sentence. According to analysis in TFA, he took apart an LED clock (a Micronta 63756 to be exact) and transplanted it into a pencil case. I had an old LED alarm clock (since replaced by my phone) that plugged into a 120V source, but also took 2 AA batteries as a backup source so that you wouldn't lose your alarm if the power went out. The oddities of the design are due to whatever engineer came up with it in the 70s.

First projects should be celebrated even if minor

[rhysweatherley]

My first computer program was little more than 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD", but young me was damn proud at the time of making a computer do something ... anything ... and would have loved to share that enthusiasm with others.

It doesn't matter whether Ahmed built the clock from scratch after forging his own components from rocks in a furnace or disassembled something else and made a small change. Who cares. We all had to start somewhere and a little encouragement goes a long way.

Don't let the know-nothings get you down Ahmed. Keep at it.

I liked the Charle Hebdo cartoons

[huckamania]

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.

If you see something, say something

[TapeCutter]

If the teachers/cops thought the box was a credible threat, the school would have been evacuated and the bomb squad called in, they do the evacuation part even if they think it is a prank call. Neither action was taken here, yet they had physical 'evidence' of the bomb. To me this indicates they thought the kid was being a smart-arse and gave him the "scare the naughty boy" routine. The only thing different about the millions of other kids around the world who have received a traditional "official scare," is that this time it backfired on the officials. Which IMO is a good thing, since the practice does nothing but stamp the "might is right" message on its hapless victims.

The odd thing here is that one teacher knew he had the clock and it knew was harmless, that teacher "saw something", why did he not speak up when the others thought it was a "credible threat"?

does this lad have a history?

[bzipitidoo]

Something else to consider is this kid's history. Is he a prankster? Or, has he shown anti-social behavior, written long rambling notes about how he'd like to kill the teachers and other students? Is he on anti-psychotic drugs? The schools keep records on that kind of stuff, they should know.

If he had no troubled history, there was no reason to think he'd suddenly turned into an angry, dangerous teen, and was about to enact a murder-suicide revenge fantasy. The school's reaction was way over the top, and cowardly.