Look at that face and name: there’s someone who clearly needs careful scrutiny. He’s a 14 year old in Irving, Texas, who likes to build electronic gadgets. He must be very dangerous, because when he showed up at school with a digital device he’d built, the police were called and he was handcuffed and led out of the school and taken to jail.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”
Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.
The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.
“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
You know, it’s really not that hard to tell a clock from a bomb, unless, of course, you’re a dumbfuck racist cop or school administrator.
Ahmed Mohamed is going to grow up, go to college, become a successful engineer, and vote. That’s what ought to scare these bigots.
Here he tells his own story.
He sounds like the kind of kid colleges will be avidly recruiting in a few years. At least he’s going to have no problem getting out of Irving, Texas.
Hopefully he’ll be able to build the jetpack to rocket him out of there as soon as he can.
seems like the first thing that should have happened is calling the engineering teacher into the school office to explain to the english teacher and the police that this really wasn’t a bomb and only a clock. also, if it was a bomb, why not call the bomb squad? don’t they have proper processes for those kinds of things?
Movie bomb……
Sam Harris would be so impressed at this success of anti-profiling.
“It looks like a movie bomb.”
That statement is incredibly telling. A person who almost certainly believes the Bible is true arrests a kid for making a clock that looks nothing like a bomb because it looks like prop bombs in movies. Just that level of being unable to tell the difference between fiction and reality says so much.
Also, while this is off topic, has anyone been following the case of Richard Glossip? He’s scheduled to be executed by Oklahoma in a few hours for a murder he was convicted of based entirely on the testimony of the person who actually committed it. I’m not sure why this is bothering me more than any of the millions of other people murdered by the United States but I can’t stop thinking about it.
The BBC write-up of the same story quotes one of the cops as saying something like “He said it was a clock, but was unable to offer a broader explanation of what it was for.”
You know what? I’M unable to offer a broader explanation of what a clock is for. And if you need one, you’re pretty fucking stupid.
It also implies that they wouldn’t need a broader explanation if he’d taken a bomb to school, because that’s just something Muslim kids do.
Wait… bombs count down…
MOvie bomb…
Do you train your police officers by sending them to the cinema?
Goodness, I can’t imagine how many police departments feel underfunded because when they zoom somebody in the background of a picture on the full screen they get some mushy pixels and not a clear shot like they do on CSI…
That’s the correct allocation of resources. Imagine how pointlessly humiliating, offensive and harmful it would have been if it had been a blonde girl in that room being insulted by astonishingly dumb racists. But this kid…he totally could have been a terrorist so it was well worth it and fully justified. This has absolutely nothing to do with racism…nothing….
Apart from the mindblowing ingorance, fear, bigotry and outright stupidity; where were the kid’s parents while he was being questioned by “police”? The terrorists have already won….
Hey! Don’t be ridiculous! Blond girls are not smart enough to build a bomb. Just wave ’em on through.
Hopefully there’s a move in there, too. It’s not the right way to fix this type of problem, but I despair that the people in such places will ever get how stupid and hateful they’re being, and then change.
This happened in Texas. I’m just sayin’ . . .
Aside from the obvious appalling racism and stupidity, real bombs do not generally have large LED readouts conveniently telling you how long you’ve got to disarm them.
Ahem. Well there was the one young blond woman in my chemistry class in college* who made a small mistake in the protocol for synthesizing nitrotolulene and ended up with three nitro- stuck on the tolulene. Yep, it exploded. Never overcook your chemistry experiments and always use the hood and safety goggles (both of which prevented any injuries in this case.)
*Who I swear was not me.
Except in (bad) movies…which as we have learned is how these morons get their “training”…
But…but…they do in the movies!
Sorry, my comment at @15 was in reference to comment @13
Guess he’s learned his lesson. From now on, at school, he’ll probably take care not to stand out. He’ll do what he’s told, and no more. No extra-curricular activity, no showing initiative, no appearing unusually smart. Good job, Texas education system!
Been watching The local coverage (I live in the next school district over from Irving ISD) and the spin the school is putting on it amounts to…
I’ve sent an email to my daughter’s principal requesting a statement regarding how they would/should approach a similar situation in our school’s district. I’m asking some of my friends to do the same. I doubt we will get a satisfactory response, but maybe the media attention combined with actual parental involvement will prompt them to analyze the situation and develop a policy to prevent it happening here.
I can’t wait for PZ’s critics to use his blond comment in an out if context way.
Yeah, cause dumb school administrators and bad cops only occur in Texas, amirite? Sure wish I could live in such a utopian ideal as peterh does. :/
He’s not the only young scientist of colour being arrested. Slightly different situation, but the result is the same: arrest, and, wouldn’t you know, tried as an adult. Thoughts on Kiera Wilmot: Mentor curiosity to create future scientists, that bit is by Emily Lakdawalla, but the first paragraph contains lots of links to other sources.
Clock.
Does Texas not employ teachers in its schools?
Not all teachers are shining beacons of thoughtfulness and intelligence, I know this, but surely they can all tell the difference between a clock and a bomb? Maybe bombs often do use timers or clocks, but they also include explosives. A clock, left to its own devices, will not explode.
This whole thing is absurd. It’s obscene.
I suggest someone post the cops’ pictures with the caption, “these people do not know the difference between a clock and a timer. It is time for some remedial education.”
He’s 14 years old and already smarter than your average Dixie-dwelling GOP-voting whitey: of course he’s dangerous. We all know what happen when dark-skinned nerds aren’t broken: they get elected president, strikes deals with Iran instead of planning to exterminate the local population, and increase the healthcare coverage and lifespan of plebeians.
***
Of course not! The USA is a modern country: cops are trained by binge-watching Steven Seagal’s movies on Netflix.
I also think people should make fun of the principal and teacher.
oh pssshhaw don’t get hung up on distinguishing clocks from timers. Easy enough to use the wakeup signal to trigger the bomb instead of the bell. In fact, more conveenient. Set the clock to blow at 5:13
PMAM. (what time is now, make sure the clock is set correct…), rather than have to figure out, 5:13 next morning is 8 hrs 27 minutes from… right… (3)(2)(1)*engage*. much nicer bomb, that latter is too fiddly.aarrrrgggghhhh, regardless
clearly they were goin’ preemptive. Ahmed clearly had a component of a bomb. Why else would anyone want to build a clock, when you can just pop into Wallymart and get one for 2 dollahs (+ tax, batteries not included). So he musta had some nefarious event in the workings…
This is how all the movies play out, those documentary histories like Die Hard, and many others, The ones that the good sherrif got his training, so as to so easily recognize the .
Clearly racial profiling don’t happen in the good state of Texas. They just respond to obvious threats and take appropriate actions. And, of course, keep careful watch on those sneaky, rebellious teenagers, with suspicious names and parentage and !religious! heritages.
ack. gotta wash keyboard
Definitely. Especially when you consider that Irving is not some little town in west Texas populated by 3 people and a cow. It’s a suburb of Dallas. Dallas has electricity. People in the suburbs of Dallas should be able to recognize a digital clock when they see one.
laurentweppe @ 26
Duh, they are trained by binge-watching the Police Academy movies, while in the Police Academy.
re YOB@22:
in defense of peterh, he is merely pointing out that this story seems to fall into the immense clustrfock of such stories that mostly seem to originate from Texas. He not sayin only Texas is infested, we just rarely hear about such stuff in other states. Who’s covering them up? Why is Texas being persecuted particularly?
just sayin.
sorry to try starting some online debate. just defending peterh’s remark as just a quick flyby comment, as a ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ kinda thing, I don’t think he was trying to imply he lives in a utopia, etc.
ugh. reading what i wrote: I seem pretty verbose and needlessly sensitive… sorry… movin along (I hope)
What I find most chilling about this story is that it is obvious that the police and school officials knew they weren’t dealing with a bomb. Their actions tell us this.
What would you do if you saw something in a crowded building that you thought might explode? You’d call the police, yes, but you’d also evacuate the building. And if the people in the building were minors, you’d call their parents.
And the police would call in a bomb squad, from the state police if they didn’t have their own.
But the story mentions none of this activity, and I’m sure it would have if it had occurred, or if not, the school would be pointing it out by now. So, no, they didn’t act to ensure the safety of their students. One could excuse actions taken in an excess of caution, even stupid actions taken in an excess of caution. But here there was no caution, only malice. And that scares me.
It should be pretty fucking obvious whether there was anything at all that could even hold the components of a bomb, a detonator, a charge, whatever.
But he built something and he has a weird, frightening name and his face is oh-so-saturnine and threatening, I’m sure. I can’t even imagine would it would be like to live under such general suspicion as poor folks like him do.
And it’s not just Texas, nor just the USA. Right-wing populism and fear-mongering is growing in Europe at an alarming rate, too, what with the current refugee crisis. That’s despite all of the welcoming and friendly gestures many people around here do, also.
It’s so basic and yet so harmful. Frightened of “the others”.
Here’s a letter sent by the school to parents: http://www.vox.com/2015/9/16/9336557/ahmed-mohamed-clock-school
No apology, not even a non-apology, and an implied blaming of Ahmed for violating the Student Code of Conduct.
This has probably been the most educative experience that Ahmed will get out of that school.
A 6th grade classmate once brought in a homemade calculator constructed of wires, cardboard, and christmas lights. I can only imagine what these nimrods would have thought of that – “Derp. it looks like one of them there terminator robots I seen on the TV, call the PO-lice”.
That’s a vast understatement. I watch a lot of foreign news, and if one was to extrapolate from that, one would be forgiven for thinking that half the population from Egypt to Pakistan was named Ali, Ahmed, Mohammed, or Abdul. I once saw a correspondant named Mohammed interview a guy named Mohammed and his friend…wait for it… Mohammed. Surely that gets confusing, as if everyone was George Foreman. On the flip side, when you tune into African news, you’ll likely never see the same name twice. I’m sure the anthropologists in the audience would have a lot to say about that.
@32 Coleslaw
Absolutely, this was done in order to humiliate this kid. Transparently so.
Turns out this is not the first time Irving TX has been in the news for making Muslim citizens feel unwelcome.
A Patheos blogger seems to have mistaken the bill for an anti-Semitic bill; whatever its intentions, it seems to have succeeded in raising the hackles of religious minorities.
In such an atmosphere, it isn’t surprising that authorities don’t feel bound much to demonstrate deference and respect to Muslims, even if they are only high school freshmen.
The really stupid thing is that this is one way to make a suicidal jihadist, how many people have been radicalised by bad treatment by officialdom because of thie religion and/or colour.
Really?! :o
You should get out more.
.
.
With that said, In the interest of not derailing the thread, I will cease replying to the “Texas sucks” sub-thread developing here. *sings to self* Let it gooo. Let it gooooooo
I will, however, post any reply I may get from my school district, if anyone would be interested. (re: my @20 above)
Wow, that’s really embarrassing, sharing a country with such thinkers. Those damn clocks must be like magnets, ever mysterious, with nefarious purpose.
i read the “movie bomb” quote a little differently:
the cop might have been saying that the device obviously looks like a fake bomb — one a child would build, not knowing how one actually works, borrowed from some action movie the kid had seen.
in which case the cop was implying that the child really was trying to teach himself to build a bomb, something which of course all brown-skinned mideast boys named “ahmed” are genetically hardwired [rimshot!] to do once they hit puberty, on their way to blossoming into full-grown terrorists.
thank cthulhu they caught this one in time.
The “broader explanation” was that he brought it in to show his teachers what he could build. He wanted to demonstrate his competency as an engineer to them. He TOLD them this. He gave a broader explanation, but they were too dumb to listen to him.
aarrgghh @ 41:
It’s not clear whether the movie bomb bit was stated by the principal of the school or the initial cop, but those words had no business being spoken by any intelligent, rational person, let alone one involved in education.
This is what can happen when your educational system and culture devalues science and engineering and your school administration and your police force grow up listening to RW talk radio and TV. A perfect storm of mindless stupidity.
coleslaw @#32,
Those were absolutely my thoughts. None of those people believed that this was a bomb, and I suspect that none of them really believed (except, perhaps the teacher who initially overreacted) that it was even a precursor to a bomb.
I suspect that the intimidation, questioning, suspension were all aimed at trying to legitimise that initially absurd reaction. Sadly, this type of theatrical ass-covering petty persecution is very commonplace, even when we consider law-enforcement agencies dealing with adults.
The claim is always that the (racist, brutal, authoritarian) overreaction is not the problem, but that the suspect (that identity which the innocent victim suddenly acquires) was acting unreasonably. Of course, suspicious suspects may not have done anything wrong, other than to cross the path of someone sufficiently paranoid and bad-willed. But then, more appropriate labels like innocent bystander or wrongly accused are such emotional pieces of language, aren’t they?
If they don’t have anything to hide, why did they run? If they weren’t doing anything wrong, why didn’t they just comply? If they didn’t want to get into trouble, why did they break the code of conduct by carrying a suspicious clock?
I hope that the public is becoming wise to this tactic.
Perhaps it was not obvious that this thing was a clock, but once it became obvious that it was, how did nobody have sufficient shame to try to put this right and to simply say sorry?
I can only assume that someone will tell them to stop, and to stop before the $ cost of the compensation bill becomes any higher. I also anticipate that the only lesson any of the various authorities will learn is that their sterling efforts to stop terrorist schoolchildren from telling the time are unappreciated by pesky outsiders and liberals. No-one will be disciplined or even retrained.
dianne @ 42
As a STEM nerd, the broader reasons are obvious: he’s a 14 year old engineering nerd. He builds things because wants to learn these skills, and because making things is neat. But I guess people assume that’s for white engineering nerds only. How much of the refusal to accept these broader reasons is the assumption that Muslim kids don’t do things for fun, or to show off, or all the normal reasons kids do things?
I sincerely hope he and his parents sue the school district and get enough to pay for him and any siblings he might have to go to Caltech or MIT, without need for a scholarship, right through their Ph.Ds.
Did anyone notice the bit about his father? From the article:
Seems likely Ahmed’s father is well known to the local bigots, and probably not popular. While I think the reaction to Ahmed’s clock is adequately explained by stupidity and fear, is it also possible that it was a way to punish his father?
Lighten up – at least the cops didn’t shoot him dead outright. For Texas that’s pretty good.
There’s an IStandWithAhmed hashtag on Twitter that’s getting a good amount of action.
What I would love to see is a viral moment when kids all across the US bring clocks to school. With no broader explanation than, some adults are morons and we don’t expect to grow up to be like you.
robinjohnson @34, the other thing this might teach him is to radicalize his thinking and all of a sudden he turns into what they’re afraid of, but that’s ok, his fingerprints are now illegally on record. So much wrong here.
Sally Strange @37, someone should remind these yahoos that some orthodox Jews follow Hebraic law and have their own courts right here in ‘Murica, land of the free to discriminate.
Larry @44, this, this, so much this; we don’t need no steenkin education.
when thinking about police behavior never discount their personal need to show off how tough and brave they are. That need to be acknowledged as the hero is a prime motivation for going into law enforcement.
Ignorance and fear and suspicion of the none whites contributes to who will be treated and in what way,
criminalizing children is not a new or extreme response by school administrations these days. When in doubt it’s call the police that way you have covered your ass, besides they are only minority kids or poor kids or otherwise disadvantaged any way.
these stories are not very rare and hope fails me, on the other hand they are covered as news instead of being ignored because no one cares maybe that is positive.
uncle frogy
Looks like the kid just got invited to the White House
As somebody said on Twitter, that’s some A+ trolling.
Giliell, #53
That is awesome.
Goodness, I love when Obama does stuff like that!
Moggie @ 19 said:
“Guess he’s learned his lesson. From now on, at school, he’ll probably take care not to stand out. He’ll do what he’s told, and no more. No extra-curricular activity, no showing initiative, no appearing unusually smart. Good job, Texas education system!”
You are very right about how the Texas education system discourages the brightest students who happen to not be white.
I once taught an excellent student in a Texas school who happened to be from S. Korea.
The boy was brilliant, but he often frustrated his teachers because he did everything that he could to blend in and not appear smarter than his classmates. It was a surprise to everyone that he was the salutatorian of his class – it was the first time that the counseling office had ever heard of him! As it turned out, he was an undocumented child who was brought to the US when he was 7 years old. Another teacher in the school helped him to apply for scholarships and I heard that he graduated with a 4.0 average and then self-deported to S. Korea. He was afraid that he might get in trouble, so the US lost a brilliant mind.
This ought to rev the RWNJ frothometer up to 11.
What stuns me is that neither the school nor the cops even tried to give themselves plausible deniability. They didn’t evacuate the school, didn’t call a bomb squad, didn’t call Homeland Security. It’s clear from their actions they never actually believed it was a bomb. They just took the opportunity to bully a Muslim kid.
interresssting [tenting fingers]
– if you build a clock ineptly (it beeps randomly), and when asked about it say “it’s a clock. I built myself”; then clearly it’s a “hoax bomb”, it’s “off to jail, do not pass go”.
– so if a bomb was one’s intent, and get discovered in the process, just answer “it’s some doohickey that beeps at random, to disrupt class” i.e admit to a ridiculous, minor, charge to get away with the full sinister plan.
ugh
I suspect that the “expansive explanation” they were expecting, was along the lines of “it’s something I was working at and had probs, so I was bringing it in, to show my teacher, to help me fix {sob}”. Without all the extra emotion, it looks like he is hiding something sinister, so “hoax bomb” is the minimum charge they could come up with.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
it is sad that things are so high strung that the most minor incident gets such attention. both levels. (1st) that a little cobbled together device could get the police involved,(2nd) that story of such intervention provokes such media attention and outrage.
If Mr Mohamed does accept the invitation to meet with President Obama, I do rather hope he does what Ms Yousafzai did (before, as I recall, she won the Nobel Peace Prize): Explain, in no uncertain terms, that Mr Obama’s extrajudicial drone killings are an excellent recruitment tool for precisely the type of person the goons said they were worried about — someone who makes and/or explodes bombs.
Mr Obama being “trolled” by two intelligent young teenagers on the precisely the same point has gotta leave a mark.
@Caine #43:
Sadly, the Bible Belt disagrees.
“Assumptions and fear don’t keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building.”
That quote is from Hillary Clinton’s twitter feed.
The geeks will inherit the earth. I’ve just seen one in pole position. Good on you Ahmed, keep it up!
Glenn Greenwald has an interesting piece in response to this event, which kind of ties in to the previous article about Harris and profiling. The final paragraphs sum it up:
Government paranoia fuels bigotry, and Harris’ insistence on defending profiling feeds right into in exactly the same way.
@Becca Stareyes, #46:
Fundamental Attribution Error + Racism/Religious Prejudice = School—>Jail Pipeline
So…
…when Whitey’s cell phone rings in class, does Whitey get asked to set it to vibrate, or does Whitey get arrested for terrorizing the class with a hoax bomb?
And hell when Whitey remembers to set it to vibrate but doesn’t turn it off, does the mysterious intermittent buzzing get Whitey arrested for terrorizing the class with a hoax bomb?
Inquiring minds want to know.
“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
Then why didn’t he call in a film crew?
The movie bomb doesn’t even have movie explosives. Looks like an LCD panel and controller and a transformer with a battery lead. It bears no resemblance to a bomb at all — not even a silly hollywood representation of a bomb. No relay, no primary or secondary power, no blasting cap or blasting cap circuit, and no explosive payload.
http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20150916&t=2&i=1079919832&w=644&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=LYNXNPEB8F158
blf@59: The difference between Ahmed and Malala is that Malala lives in a region that has drones terrorizing her and her compatriots, and she took a bullet to the brain from the terrorist goons. Ahmed is a suburban US kid. He’s got expert knowledge of how the unflinching stupidity of certain school administrators collides with bigotry, not so much about what drives recruitment of violent islamic fundamentalist groups.
When I was a lad, movie film was made with nitrate, and you could literally make a bomb out of a movie.
When I was his age and crazy about science and technology I made things far more dangerous than a digital clock. In fact some of those things are probably now illegal like the batch of rocket fuel I cooked up in my backyard. No, it wasn’t the standard candied saltpeter-sugar mixture. My only meddling with clocks though was taking them apart to see how they work. If I send my rocket-fuel recipe to Obama will he invite me to the White House?
Next time Ahmed should bring a handmade gun to school. It’s Texas. What could they say?
Oh for fucksake. It is a device. It’s a time-telling device. I have one on my wrist as I type this. I’m typing it on another time-telling device that also happens to be a calculation and communication device. I have another one in my pocket. I have a time-telling device that converts electromagnetic signals into sound right in front of me. Next to that is one that includes visual.
I even have a time-telling device and EM-to-sound device built into my one-ton transportation device. I am assuming most of the students arrived to school in similar devices that day.
Two things:
1) A cardboard box could just has easily been mistaken for such a “device”.
2) Why the fuck would he leave his clock under a fucking car?
Actually a third thing:
It was built so he could show he could make a time-telling device! Also so that he could tell time.
Oh, good lord. That letter isn’t even addressing the way one kid was made to feel very un-safe. And nobody is talking about the cop saying that it was who he thought it was.
The picture of the device makes me wonder how anybody could think it a bomb. The black wire is a power cable from the wall. The chunky thing is a transformer, like your laptop has on its cord. The first strip of board must be the clock circuit. The wires from that go to another board, which must be the controller for the image display. The flat, grey, multiple strand part is going up into the back of the display. The display must be mounted on the front face of the case, there. There is simply and absolutely no place for explosives, unless he had access to some very odd stuff and was playing a very elaborate ruse.
(Frankly, looking at the thing, I am faintly disappointed. It looks like just clipping some pre-made boards together, and only the display is properly mounted. Unless he did some programming that I can’t see, it isn’t amazing. Except that nobody else can do what he did, these days. He showed initiative, and understands more than most. I’d give him an A.)
Good for Obama. I do hope he makes this a teachable moment.
Does anyone notice a lot of disheartening parallels with the Ghostwriter episode “Who Is Max Mouse?” Visibly smart dark-skinned boy is assumed to be up to no good and is going to get sent to jail for doing nothing after a teacher mistakes some techy stuff for a bomb threat. Sad that people could see this sort of thing coming 20 years ago.
Of course in that case there actually was someone up to no good: a smart white girl. But the smart dark-skinned boy was automatically blamed for it.
Bob Foster, #71
A dark-skinned person with a gun?
It’s not what they’ll say but what they’ll do.
“Frankly, looking at the thing, I am faintly disappointed. It looks like just clipping some pre-made boards together, and only the display is properly mounted. Unless he did some programming that I can’t see, it isn’t amazing. ”
One of the articles I read said he whipped it together between dinner and bed time Sunday night. So I think it is perfectly reasonable for it to look a little rough.
My flatmate sent this to me last night, and we both ended up really upset (we’re both trained as teachers, although I’m currently not working as one) — not only is this exactly the sort of thing teachers should be encouraging in students, but Ahmed looks so much like my little cousin (whom I cared for for a couple of years after his mother died) even down to his mannerisms and the way he speaks — I just couldn’t finish watching the film clip.
Every time he and his father visit their family in the USA, I am so worried about something like this happening. I just don’t understand how grown adults, supposedly professionals could go out of their way like that to make one child (who they are supposed to be caring for, on top of everything else) feel unsafe and unwanted.
Then he definitely knew what he was doing. An A+ from me.
Well it so happens I live a few hundred yards from MacArthur High. The school is located in the midst of a combination of rough neighborhoods, nicer ones (like mine), and quite rich ones (the Byron Nelson is held at the nearby country club). Over the 10 years my wife and I have been here, the kids at the HS have gotten progressively darker on average, but that is mostly due to the influx of south Asians to Irving (it’s now easier to get good Indian takeout than good Mexican or Italian). Sadly, south Asians here seem to be mostly Republican. Not sure why. Incidents that remind me that I live in the south are fortunately rare. But the last one was about a month ago – the schools’ south football field border wall that also serves as the back fence for a row of adjoining houses, was spray painted with some nasty racist graffiti – anti-black. It took them over 3 days to remove it. But at least they got it off before football practice season started. The area is very racially mixed, but until a few years ago, I knew of no Muslims nearby. Then a Muslim family (judging by their garb)) moved a few doors down. But a few months ago their landlord needed to sell and they couldn’t afford it, so they moved out and the new family is white. The Mosque you read about is about 4 miles west of here, next to a police and fire training academy, and next to a great Moroccan restaurant, the Kasbah. It’s a converted convenience store and has been decorated tastefully with Moroccan artifacts. The people who own and operate it are among the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. Devout Muslims. Kind, cheerful, wonderful people. They don’t even mind us atheists . Best bastella in Texas too. Beth, the mayor of Irving, is a real nasty rightwing nut case, as you’ve probably heard. But then, have I mentioned this is the south? Most of our liberal friends have long since moved to northern states. The only reason we’re still here is the job. What that poor kid went through is just another brick in the wall. We’ll get out some day. I promise.
[cross-posting from Racism thread]
My brother just texted me these pictures: Picture 1 | Picture 2
That was just done to a mosque near where he lives.
This is the hyperbolic telephone game that comes from repetition. It wasn’t meant to be “amazing” or a masterwork. It’s not even one of Ahmed’s better works. It’s just something he slapped together in twenty minutes. It’s the first few weeks at a new school and he wanted to impress a teacher by showing the teacher he liked to build things as a hobby and maybe get encouragement for extra-curricular activity of the sort.
======
I get the impression from the different articles I’ve read that no-one ever actually thought it was a bomb, but they thought it was a potential bomb scare. The scare hadn’t actually been done yet and it’s only a possibility that was the intent but it’s soooo scary that, of course, handcuffs, juvenile detention, threats of explusion, etc. … *sheesh*… They look more and more like pigs the more they talk.
A dark skinned kid is menacing just for being there, if he has a gun it’s just overkill. Open carry is for white people only.
Part of the good news…he’s been invited to apply to MIT. The invitation was from a (female, Muslim) Physicist.
If *I* were going to design a bomb with a countdown timer, (a) the display would not be part of the timing mechanism to set it off, and (b) it would go off well before the counter reached zero. (Note the “if” there.)
No one at the school (or the cop shop) actually thought is was bomb (or else at least one teacher was too dumb to tie her own shoelaces). The English teacher took it away from him when the alarm went off…and put it on her desk. No evacuation of the room (or school) or anything else one would do if one actually thought a bomb was present.
Texas has a long history of “promoting” losing football coaches to be school admins. Apparently, the principal is one of those. He may have held the post for a long time, as the practice was severely inhibited at the behest of the TX legislature through an effort by…H. Ross Perot. (Perot was concerned about finding enough competent graduates to keep EDS going.)
The Maker community has also rallied for Ahmed.
The result of all this looks like it’s going to work well for Ahmed (once he recovers from the trauma), but what about all the other kids that get this sort of treatment causing them to quit doing innovative activities?
“I thought is was real when I shot and killed him.”
|My brother just texted me these pictures: …
One of the pictures says, “This is for France…”?!?
When did we stop calling the French ‘frogs’? When did we stop calling them ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’? “Je suis Charlie Abdo” went out of style already. Certainly they’ve done something new to thwart American will? Do the French even want us taking up for them?
Salt
annetaylor @ 85:
If you ever start making sense, stop by then. Until that time, please refrain from the happy use of bigoted slurs, and speak for yourself. I have never once referred to French people as frogs or anything except people.
Right on cue we have an example of how well Slippery Sam’s system works.
annetaylor@85, I congratuate you on spelling most words in an understandable manner, and constructing your sentences in a parse-able fashion. This suggests you attended school, or at least managed to learn something, which is a considerable step up from the usual class of foolish knaves around here.
There are few improvements I can suggest: Less bigotry, more logic (considerably more, actually), and the common sense of a dead garden snail.
Should you wish additional instruction in humanity, I suggest returning to Earth. As a hint, the sky is normally blue during the Sun-lite hours.
Apologies for the typo, I meant Sun-lit.
Further to me prev comment about his mannerisms being similar to my cousins, I forgot to mention that he only picked up those mannerisms (almost tics) after the trauma of his mother’s death, so seeing those again in another young face… I truly hope Ahmed is okay. It’s one thing to have accolade and treats now that he’s gone viral, but when social media moves on, I hope he still has help.
@Caine and @blf I think annetaylor was just pointing out the hypocrisy of right-wing politicians and pundits attacking France one moment and then using them as support for their bigotry the next.
annetaylor, #85
I should have mentioned that’s a mosque in Kentucky. I have a strong feeling it’s some American white supremacist false-flagging who just went for the recently popular example of Charlie Hebdo and the perennially popular example of the Middle Eastern superpower occupying force that’s somehow supposed to be an oppressed victim of its own victims.
The “Nazis speak Arabic” one made me angry and laugh out loud at the same time. Inexcusably offensive and provably incorrect.
First Dog on the Moon, published in The Grauniad, has a nice cartoon about these racist goons, Ahmed Mohamed: it’s a clock with a built-in racism detector: “I think we have all learnt an important lesson from this situation which is that ‘brown’ people with aspirations are dangerous”.
@85.annetaylor :
Huh?
I don’t know. Depends on the person. Some people called French folks “Frogs” and “Cheese eating surrender monkeys” some have stopped, some still do and some never did.
The name of the magazine is ‘Charlie Hebdo’ not “Abdo” & without French forces the USA probably wouldn’t have won – or at least would’ve had a much harder time winning it’s independence from George III’s England. (For the USA to have later elected a ‘George II’ does seem a rather retrograde step but is an entirely separate issue.) Have the French done anything to piss off the Americans lately? Dunno. Do the French want others speaking for them? Je ne parlez francais mais (probably) non. Wakirimasen. (To add a Japanese word to the french here.)
Salt? Um .. Pepper? What? I don’t understand, please can you elucidate for us.
I’m sorry but I’m really not sure what point you are trying to make here with that.
Those pictures of a vandalised mosque are sad but sadly not that exceptional. Except “nazi’s speaking Arabic!” .. yegods!! The stoopid burns!