Why the “Muslim Bomb Clock Kid” Story Makes Me Want to Puke
There are actually several reasons.
1) Have we not realized yet that just because someone is named Ahmed, that doesn’t mean they’re a threat, or sympathize with those who are threats? Here’s a news flash: in every place we’ve fought Muslims, we’ve had Muslim allies. There are some Muslims who hate ISIS or Al Qaeda more than any average American, because they’ve had to deal with terrorism face to face. A whole bunch of Jordanian Muslims watched ISIS burn one of their brave young pilots to death, and they were pretty pissed about it. Think a Jordanian named Ahmed is automatically suspicious? Then you’re an idiot.
2) At a school, can’t we expect to find at least one person who knows that “jumble of wires in a briefcase” doesn’t necessarily mean “bomb”? One sane, responsible adult could have said, “Hmmm. That looks odd, but it’s just a bunch of wires, a circuit board and a digital display. If it was a bomb it would contain actual explosive material, but there isn’t any. And the kid says it’s a clock. By golly, I think it’s a clock too.” But, of course, no sane, responsible adult was willing to do that. Does everyone in America, even our teachers, base their reactions on what the movies tell them a bomb is supposed to look like?
3) Why would the cop make that arrest? You have a kid in a NASA shirt who sure as hell looks like a science nerd, with a device that clearly isn’t a bomb, which the kid says isn’t a bomb. By all accounts the kid never said it was a bomb. I can’t imagine by what reasoning the officer decided, “I need to arrest this kid for having a clock that isn’t a bomb and doesn’t look like a bomb and that he never said was a bomb.”
4) How did we get so terrified of litigation that a teacher would say, “I know that’s not a bomb but I’m reporting this to the principal anyway, because if something happens I’m not willing to be responsible for it,” and the principal would say, “I know that’s not a bomb but I’m reporting this to the police anyway, because if something happens I’m not willing to be responsible for it,” and the responding officer would say, “I know that’s not a bomb but I’m arresting this kid anyway, because if something happens I’m not willing to be responsible for it.”? Having worked in local government for decades, I can almost guarantee that’s what happened. Everyone up the chain probably knew they were overreacting, everyone knew it was just a clock and no action should have been taken, everyone thought it was stupid to report it and call the police, but everyone up the chain took unnecessary action anyway. Because nobody had the balls to say, “This is bullshit and everybody needs to calm down.”
5) God dammit. Why do legions of social justice warriors act like they figured out some amazing conspiracy? “We knew it! They never thought it was a bomb! But they arrested him anyway!” Well, no shit. He was arrested for possession of a hoax bomb; that literally means, “fake bomb”. Yes, they knew all along it was fake. They didn’t arrest him because they believed the bomb was real, they arrested him for (allegedly) trying to trick people into believing his clock was a bomb.
The issue isn’t “they knew all along it wasn’t real and they lied so they’d have a reason to arrest this kid.” The issue is, “they knew all along it wasn’t real and they could have just ignored it like the non-event it was, but everyone is so scared of violating some policy and getting sued later that they’d rather pass the buck as far as possible, even if it means arresting an innocent kid for doing nothing wrong at all.”
Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe Ahmed the science nerd is actually a fourteen-year old ISIS commander. Maybe he ran the halls shouting “kill the infidel” before pulling his clock from his backpack. Maybe he made bomb jokes. Maybe there is some damn reason, somewhere, that would make this arrest reasonable.
Maybe. But if there is a reason, the school and police sure aren’t letting us in on it.
So unless and until we find out more information, I can only reach one conclusion. This was a ridiculous, moronic, cowardly overreaction by people who’d rather sacrifice a good kid than take responsibility for doing the right thing. And the right thing, of course, would have been to say, “That’s an awesome clock. What else can you build?”
Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at chris_hernandez_author@yahoo.com or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
Filed under: Cops | 105 Comments
Tags: ahmed mohamed, hoax bomb, veteran writers
chrishernandezauthor 
Thank you.
So tired of explaining to idiots that it doesn’t even remotely look like a bomb.
It is missing the C4 or other charge, but other than that… you are 100% wrong. This is EXACTLY what a bomb looks like
I’m going to have to agree.
That’s not a science project, that’s an old alarm clock repurposed to serve as a bomb timer, or at a minimum, to deliberately resemble one.
I spent a lot of time working with intel on IED devices; that thing looks like most of the ones I’ve seen the EOD work on. In order to determine whether or not this thing was actually modified to be a bomb timer, you’d have to look at the outputs for the alarm circuit: Are they wired to a buzzer, or left loose to be attached to an electric detonator?
This kid couldn’t have done a better job of making something that looked like an IED meant to be left somewhere in the school and detonated on a timer if he’d been working from plans. I find it hard to believe that anyone with experience in these things can’t see that. The key thing for me is that the display isn’t facing the outside of the pencil case, it’s facing in. If he were building a genuine clock, why the hell would you do that, instead of keeping everything of the mechanism concealed?
Textbook repurposing of a household item to serve as a timer, I’m afraid. I’ve built things like this myself, for training events. Something about this whole deal stinks, and the fact that there was a full-scale media blitz waiting for this to happen tells me that this incident is either something someone was waiting to exploit, or that they actively set it up. Given the proven Justice Department involvement with the Ferguson and Zimmerman media fiascoes, I’m no longer thinking shit like this is “just happening…”. I think we’re watching an active campaign to discredit and delegitimize civil and police authority take place. Why has this one kid been singled out for White House attention, out of all the other victims of “Zero Tolerance” policies, again?
Oh, yeah… Right name, right faith, and right ethnicity. Don’t question the narrative.
Interesting data point supporting the idea that this is actually a Dezinformatsiya event: The kid’s dad is… Wait for it… The same guy who debated Robert Spencer back in 2011, over the question of whether or not Islam respects human rights. He’s also been involved in political activities back in his native Sudan, having been made vice president of the National Reform Party there. Still, he lives here in the US… Strange, that.
I’m not going to defend what the school did, or how the police reacted, but this is looking less and less like a “real” event, and more like something contrived to stir up controversy.
How many other kids caught up in this Zero Tolerance BS have received invitations to the White House? What are the odds that the one who does happens to be the son of a reasonably well-known Islamic activist?
Kirk, bro, I know you’ve been there and done that, and you’re mad intelligent. But suggesting this is part of a campaign to delegitimize police authority? How the f**k could they have counted on the police taking the actions they did? This kid TOLD A TEACHER ABOUT THE CLOCK AND SHOWED IT TO HIM before the circus started. That teacher had a brain and didn’t think it was a bomb, didn’t report it, and didn’t call the police. As part of this alleged “campaign”, this kid brings a disassembled and reassembled clock (in a different housing) to school and shows an engineering teacher? How did that follow the nefarious plan?
There was no way they could have counted on this reaction. There was no way they could have planned on Ahmed being arrested, transported and processed but released without being charged. Even the Irving PD chief said they determined there was no evidence he intended to trick anyone into thinking he had a bomb. How does the act of bringing a homemade clock into school to show it to a teacher, which is exactly what he did, become evidence of a broad plot (involving not just Ahmed and his father but the media and the DOJ) to delegitimize police?
You’re providing conjecture. Show me evidence. Without evidence, this is just another conspiracy theory, and a poorly constructed one at that.
Who took the snapshot of the bewildered kid in what appears to be the school office? The teacher, principal, police, fellow student, parent? Why? How is questioning media reporting/narratives a “conspiracy theory”?
1) Just about every high school kid has a cell phone with a camera.
2) Questioning media narratives isn’t the issue. Suggesting a coordinated campaign exists to delegitimize the police, which involves the media, DoJ, and presumably the police themselves (since the officers at the school would have had to take specific actions in order to assist in the campaign against themselves), requires evidence.
Where is the evidence such a campaign exists?
Chris said: “Suggesting a coordinated campaign exists to delegitimize the police, which involves the media, DoJ, and presumably the police themselves (since the officers at the school would have had to take specific actions in order to assist in the campaign against themselves), requires evidence.” This is exactly the point I was trying to make, though Chris has said it more quietly and cogently. Let me return to this point & hopefully do a better job of explaining what I meant.
Conspiracy theories of the sort I listed in my earlier comment tend to be built on long lists of supposed “clues” taken from photos or media accounts. Indeed, one might say that without a “media narrative” to pick apart and sift through, it would be impossible to construct one of these conspiracy theories. Why? Because the theorists never actually go out to get the evidence that Chris asks for.
So typically a list of supposed clues and contradictions is accumulated – a timeline seems wrong, or a photo shows some vague fuzzy thing; or a technical claim is made, for example that the clock really looks a lot like a bomb (and so it MUST be a bomb), or that a fire in one of the towers couldn’t have burn as hot as it supposedly did, therefore there was some other cause of the fire. Etc.
But what’s missing from all these conspiracies is what Chris points to when he asks for evidence of involvement by the media, DoJ, and police. To succeed, these supposed conspiracies would have required the willing participation of anywhere from several hundred persons (for a very small event) up to hundreds of thousands of persons (for something like 9/11 or Boston). And these persons would have little in common with each other aside from doing their jobs. Government officials, journalists, police, military, and a huge number of ordinary citizens whose jobs would logically involve them – all of them would somehow have had to be suborned prior to the event. And not only that, but they’d have had to jointly maintain 100 percent silence – and not for a brief while, but over years and years and years.
Just think about any actual conspiracy & how silence was never totally achievable. During Hitler’s reign of terror, it could not be completely contained within German society what he was doing to the Jews. Yes, there was an effort to only involve those in the military who needed to know; but it was not a complete secret. If it were that easy to keep military operations secret, the phrase “loose lips sink ships” would never have come into being.
What really makes me laugh, though, is this notion that journalists in particular are part of a vast left wing conspiracy. Only someone who was never a journalist and doesn’t personally know any journalists could ever believe such crap. I was a newspaper reporter for 10 years. Journalism in any country, including the U.S., has massive flaws in how it operates. There is definitely a herd mentality. And all too often, journalists are overly willing to take the word of people in authority, whether it’s the White House or a desk cop giving out the daily blotter to a beat reporter. But at the same time, there is nothing a reporter or editor or news publication is more desperate to score than a scoop. I was a teenager when Watergate was going on, and I later read a good deal about the reporting involved; and even though it is a Hollywood movie, “All the Presidents’ Men” was made from a pretty good book about what it’s like to be a beat reporter questioning a powerful government organization and having to push hard to do it. And journalists gossip as much as anyone. The notion that hundreds of thousands of journalists are willingly involved in a conspiracy of any sort – left, right, or center – is just ludicrous.
It’s easy to speculate bitterly that somehow, an event was manufactured. Well, some events *are* manufactured. But you need a small event with only a few highly motivated conspirators, plus as few witnesses as possible. And even then it proves tough in the long run to keep a secret.
Remember that Ahmed was being VERY evasive when answering the officer’s questions that it seemed very intentional. If I wanted to look and act suspicious, I would do the same thing. Read about the boy’s father and the pieces start to come together and make sense as the most plausible theory. Yes it is a theory, but one that the police are investigating. The theory makes sense when you consider the entire scope of actions and possible motivations since he did not invent something new but took the entire contents of a clock and repackaged them to look like what could be mistaken for a bomb by a layperson that is only familiar with Hollywood movie depictions of homemade bombs.
Could it be that the primary motivation is not one of delegitimizing the police and actually is one of supporting the father’s “Anti-Islamaphobia” campaign?
Past examples of this: Gay rights feminist professor vandalizes own car with anti-gay slogans, veteran vandalizes own car with Black Lives Matter slogans.
The motivation fits this theory.
Update@6:
“The photograph of him in handcuffs that has gone viral, however, was not taken as he was escorted from the high school. Rather, it was staged after his father insisted at the police station that the cuffs remain on so his sister could take the picture.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/18/if-it-walks-like-an-influence-operation/
I read that, and it’s absolute bullshit. Do you think that 1) suspects are uncuffed in unsecured areas in front of their family members, or 2) at a police station, police follow family’s orders to keep someone handcuffed?
I read that, and it’s absolute bullshit. Do you think that 1)suspects are uncuffed in unsecured areas in front of their family members, or 2) at a police station, police follow family’s orders to keep someone handcuffed?
Kirk, did you even look at video of the kid’s room at home, with all his electronic projects? I guess not. I have a lot of electronic gear and PCBs and tools. And I’m a liberal. I guess I must be making bombs at home, too.
The problem with your conspiracy theory is it totally disregards the entire context of what happened. Too many people would have to be utterly brain-dead and disinterested for your theory to make sense. Don’t you think the FBI has not just one but many people reviewing this high profile incident, just as a matter of course? Don’t you think there are other people besides that in various niches of law enforcement or the military who know everything you know about making bombs, and who have also reviewed this incident? Do you think you’re the only person on the planet who could possibly know the technical stuff you know?
Your theory would also mean that this kid is evil, his parents are evil, and he’s part of an enormous evil conspiracy.
This is the problem with conspiracy theories. The account you present here is no different than “the moon landing never happened,” or “9/11 was faked,” or “the Boston Marathon bombings were faked,” or “the Feds have had the bodies of aliens in deep freeze for decades now,” etc. Why is it that you are willing to use your obvious intelligence & knowledge to analyze one very small portion of this incident – whether parts of this clock in some way might resemble parts of a bomb – but then you toss all that intelligence & knowledge out the window when it comes to pondering what would have to be true for this to actually have been a conspiracy?
The moon landing, 9/11, Boston Marathon have nothing to do with this incident. One could assume the teachers, school administrators and police would respond in the manner in which they did, i.e., carry out their responsibilities as required by school policy and law. The same situation
has occurred before with predictable results.
“Although her case didn’t create quite the buzz Ahmed Mohamed’s did, Kiera Wilmot knows how Ahmed felt when he was cuffed and hauled away from school. Then 16, Wilmot brought a science-fair experiment to her school in Bartow, Florida. The lid popped off her water bottle filled with a mixture of toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil, Slate reported.
There were no injuries or property damage, but Wilmot, an 11th-grade honor student with no history of disciplinary problems, was hauled off the school grounds, suspended for 10 days and charged with two felonies. The charges were dropped and her record expunged in the wake of public outcry.”
http://www.eastidahonews.com/2015/09/caution-islamaphobia-resulted-arrest-muslim-teen/
Ahmed apparently knew his clock might raise some eyebrows, as he has stated in his YouTube video “that he closed up the box with a piece of cord because he didn’t want it to look suspicious. I’m curious, why would ‘looking suspicious’ have even crossed his mind before this whole event unfolded, if he was truly showing off a hobby project, something so innocuous as an alarm clock.”
http://to-develop.beforeitsnews.com/opinion-liberal/2015/09/ahmed-mohameds-hoax-bomb-updates-no-he-didnt-invent-it-2513526.html
Why, after being advised to put the clock away by away by his science teacher, did he take it out again in English class and PLUG IT IN so it would beep?
It is illegal to “cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies,” so of course the police were involved in a potential bomb hoax.
http://penalcode.austintexascriminaldefense.com/46.08.html
The police maintain Ahmed was not forthcoming in answering why he brought his clock to school. Maybe some further statements from the police could clarify that angle.
Ahmed is already crowd funded and lawyered up by CAIR.
Considering all of the above, it’s quite possible that Ahmed and/or his activist father were able to foresee the kind of reaction his clock might cause. The media is usually predictable in its spin. We now have a “national conversation” about the heavy handed police and racism and Islamophobia in dumb, Texas hicksville. Surprise!
It’s “quite possible” you’re a secret agent from Tajikistan. So should I suggest you are one? Or would it make more sense to present actual evidence before I even brought it up?
Priscilla, you’re doing exactly what I said conspiracy theorists do. You’re trying to tease apart a “media narrative” to insinuate something dark and scary happened that you have no actual evidence for. Well, have at it.
Chris, Randy…
You guys can’t even entertain the idea that you’re being gaslit, so you’re perfect victims for it. You want to look for world-spanning conspiracies, with dark cabals of hidden men wearing black, and you’re completely missing the distributed network of slightly involved parties who are simply working to further conditions amenable to their and other’s nefarious activities. Or, do you remember Jornolist, and all the other crap that’s been pulled over the years with these groups of people?
Frankly, I think you need to spend some more time researching just what the hell has been going on, with regards to the “activist community” furthering this crap. The people behind this shit in the media may not have been planning on this one particular kid getting caught up in the coils of all this, but they were damn sure prepared to take advantage of it. And, as Priscilla points out, the behavior he exhibited sure as hell wasn’t benign, either. The science/engineering teacher took one look at the “project”, and told him to take it home and not show it to others. “Innocent” Ahmed took it to an English class and made sure there was a stir made out over it, by setting the alarm to go off.
Oh, no, that’s not at all suspicious. And, with his father being who he is? Yeah…
Y’all are going to wake up one day, and realize there’s a common thread through all of this, and you’re going to be going “Damn… Those conspiracy whackos were right…”.
Only thing is, by then, it’s going to be too damn late.
Gaslighting. It’s not just for obsolete period illumination. Conditions are being set, and you’re enabling that to happen, I’m afraid.
Kirk, so you’re falling back on “One day you’ll realize I’m right” as your argument? That’s ridiculously weak. As far as “he didn’t get a reaction out of one teacher, so he tried another one”, again, how do you perfectly plan other people’s reactions?
I’m guessing, since you’re so obviously right, that Ahmed and his father will be shown to be part of a conspiracy to make a stir about discrimination in order to achieve some overarching goal for Islam. Since it’s so obvious to you, despite the absolute lack of evidence, then without question someone will find that evidence and make it public. It’s plain true, right? It can’t be anything else, right? If that’s the case, the some type of evidence, which backs you in some way, will come out, right?
When that evidence comes out, please let me know. I’ll admit I’m wrong when/if I’m shown that a kid built a clock, showed it to an engineering teacher and explained that it was a clock, then got another teacher to get scared and report it as a bomb, then get the school administration and police to quickly realize it wasn’t a bomb and not evacuate the school, then get arrested, then get released without charges, then have the chief of police say they determined there was no intent to trick anyone into thinking he had a bomb. Show me that Ahmed’s master plan is aided by getting not just national attention but international attention on him and his family, by having thousands of people dig into his and his family’s background to search for indications of support for extremism, and by having local and national media follow his actions for years.
Show me how this enables Ahmed to either detonate a real bomb, or, as you said earlier, “delegitimize the police”. Prove a point with evidence, not conjecture or supposition, and I’ll tell everyone you’re right.
Kirk, you have a very well-developed phraseology. But until I visit your particular astral plane I am afraid our minds shall never meet. Good day to you.
Chris, it doesn’t occur to you that creating an environment where everyone is afraid to do or say something about what they observe doesn’t further the aims of the groups behind this crap?
I seem to remember that that cop who had his gun taken away from him recently, and gained notoriety for getting the crap beaten out of him later commented that he didn’t shoot initially because he was afraid of becoming another Darren Wilson. Huh. Wonder why, with Wilson’s life getting ruined. It’s almost as if someone wanted to suppress the police, isn’t it?
Huh. Almost like Ferguson was battle-space preparation, or something… Wonder why the crime rate is going up in New York, after decades of decline?
Do you not see that even if there isn’t some vast, over-arcing conspiracy, there is a common thread weaving through all this crap, going back to Zimmerman? And, it’s not in the furtherance of any of our best interests, cops or citizens. They manage to make a big deal out of this Ahmed kid, and then the next loon to try to pull of a Columbine isn’t going to be questioned when someone notices that he’s quietly assembling his devices. It’s been awhile since I read the post-event reports, but if I remember right, the reason Klebold and the other dipshit were able to do what they did was that the few people that noticed them putting the failed devices into place didn’t recognize them for what they were. Nowadays, that wouldn’t happen, so… We get Ahmed. And, the events surrounding him are meant to de-sensitize the local authorities so that the next time something anomalous is noticed, and it actually is a bomb, they’ll remember the fuss over Ahmed, remember the aftermath for the people involved, and do nothing.
Y’all really need to read up on Gramsci, and the whole Mitrokin archive. This crap all has earmarks of a classic Soviet-style destabilization effort, and you’re not even noticing the hallmarks. In fact, when it is pointed out to you that there are points of congruency, you’re so deep in denial that you can’t acknowledge that there is a basis for taking these things with a grain of salt.
Just ask yourself this: Why this kid? Why now? How many other kids have been caught up in the same sort of Zero Tolerance BS, and it has taken weeks for the national news media to even notice, let alone do stories about? And, this blows up big, in just a few days, to the point where the White House is getting itself involved?
Yeah. Sure. Coincidence. Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about, just keep moving on…
You don’t need a cabal of nefarious characters meeting in the shadows to pull things like this off. These groups have been operating right out in the open, for years. Again, just like Jornolist. There’s no need for some headquarters element to be running things, when there are enough fellow-travellers working to like goals, and I suspect that that is what’s going on in the media, yet again. With Jornolist, we got a glimpse into the reason why it is that some stories took off, and others got suppressed in that era. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it isn’t going on, right now, either. They’re just being more careful not to let the cat out of the bag.
Wonder why it is that most of the news stories about the Great European Migration of 2015 show pictures of families with small children, yet nearly 80% of the people making the migration are military-age males–And, that’s what we see in social media pictures showing the events in countries like Croatia and Hungary, ones taken by eye-witnesses without journalism degrees?
Hmmmm… It’s almost like there’s some kind of agenda being followed, and yet we don’t have an identifiable group of conspirators. Same shit is going on here, right now, and you’re not even noticing it because you’re all caught up in the particulars of this one individual event, and don’t want to notice the discrepancies, let alone acknowledge them.
Battlespace preparation. It’s not just for warfighting, and never has been.
A favorite of mine from Wikipedia:
“The political scientist Michael Barkun, discussing the usage of “conspiracy theory” in contemporary American culture, holds that this term is used for a belief that explains an event as the result of a secret plot by exceptionally powerful and cunning conspirators to achieve a malevolent end. According to Barkun, the appeal of conspiracism is threefold:
“First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what institutional analysis cannot. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.
“Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.
“Third, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracy theorists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracy theorists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters’ deceptions.”
Um, number three sounds familiar . . .
“Yeah. Sure. Coincidence. Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about, just keep moving on…”
I should add, Kirk, that if you don’t believe in coincidence, you’d better stay away from the poker table.
Randy, apparently you don’t recognize that you’re making the same mistake the conspiracy theorists are, and instead of analyzing the events, you’re simply dismissing them as being “unlikely”.
I’ve got one word for you: Jornolist. Or, are you unaware of that bit of recent history?
How about another example? Ever heard of the book Goodbye, Good Men? You might want to pick it up, and read it carefully. In it, you can see precisely how and why you don’t need some hysteric imagined conspiracy to corrupt a set of public organizations. You just need a bunch of like-minded assholes to collude to exclude others, and enforce their own standards on who they let through the gates to join them. As a case study in the corruption of a public institution, it shows precisely how it happens. And, as I’m trying to point out, what we’re seeing here with this case is part and parcel of the problem–You’re witnessing the effect of what happens when the people deciding what is “newsworthy” just happen to “coincidentally” follow the same ideology.
You don’t need hidden cabals of conspirators for this stuff to happen. Ever wonder why it is that so few of the people acting as gatekeepers for this stuff are even slightly right-leaning, politically? Why do 90% of the political donations made by journalists go towards the Democrats? Why on earth there are so few conservatives or even Republicans working in academia?
You’re being played, and you’re not even willing to entertain the possibility that its happening to you. You remind me of that acquaintance of mine who sent off $15,000.00 to Nigeria, certain that he was going to make millions from oil money that his correspondent promised he’d get part of, if only he sent the money to help get it out of the country. I took that stupid fucker down to the fraud squad at the local police department, and he still wouldn’t believe he was getting conned. “Oh, no… That’s not possible… Nobody would do that…”. Last time I saw him, about three years later, he was still waiting for his Nigerian wealth to show up. Too stupid to live, frankly.
Plainly put, you’re naive. And, because you’re so wise and sophisticated, and dismissive of even the possibility, you’re making it even easier for them to screw you over.
We don’t have an honest news media in this country. Not now, and maybe we never did–You want to know what’s going on, you have to pay more attention to what they’re not reporting, right along with what they’re choosing to make big issues of. Where have you seen any other cases of stupid zero-tolerance abuses getting this kind of immediate attention, and this kind of notoriety this fast? Did the President or his handlers invite that kid who chewed a fucking Pop-Tart into a vague gun shape to the White House? Care to try to explain why this one case, where it’s actually pretty damn questionable about what this kid was up to, is the one that does get all the attention and the invite?
You’re living in a world of delusion, where this kind of disinformation campaign doesn’t go on. We’ve seen it time and time again, throughout the middle east, and now they’re starting it up, here. The first step of enabling it requires that authority figures be ridiculed and discredited. And, oddly, that’s precisely what was going on in Ferguson and with Zimmerman. If you disbelieve me, follow the money. Where did all the “activists” and their organizations get their funding? Some of it came from our own damn “Justice” Department, and a goodly chunk came from the Tides Foundation. Ain’t that a hoot?
Follow the money. This crap doesn’t come out of nowhere; ever wonder how the Black Block clowns got the money to show up in Ferguson, when more than a few are based out of Eugene, Oregon? Hell, if you’re a cop, ask your department’s gang intelligence people where the hell the Black Block assholes get the money to show up everywhere. They sure as hell aren’t earning it doing bake sales.
Kirk,
So this actually is a widespread, interconnected plan linking such disparate and far-flung events as the Zimmerman shooting, Ferguson and Ahmed Mohamed’s clock? You’re saying it doesn’t require shadowy men in suits pulling strings, then you say these three events, among others, are part of a plan involving deliberate media misreporting in order to delegitimize police. Our own incompetent DoJ, in fact, is working with the deliberately disinformative media, police who want to discredit themselves, and others like maybe Zimmerman (who I guess volunteered to kill someone for the cause) and Trayvon Martin (who I guess volunteered to get killed for the cause). This is all part of a master plan. They’re not unconnected events which sparked always-available public outrage, they were all intricately planned and masterfully executed.
And no evidence exists, anywhere, showing that these various people, organizations and events are working in collusion to destroy the world. That’s how good the conspiracy is.
Well, here’s my counter theory. Shit happens. Sometimes shit happens because good people make the right decisions, and stupid people get outraged because they don’t understand real life (that’s what happened in Ferguson). Sometimes good people make bad decisions, and people rightly get outraged at those decisions (Eric Garner). Sometimes bad people do bad things, and good people rightly get outraged (the Slager shooting in South Carolina). And sometimes good people do something really dumb, and provide confirmation bias to all the SJWs in the media (and there are TONS), who then pounce on it because they already believed all Muslims are innocent angels and all white people and cops are racist and evil. So those SJWs in the media report extremely sympathetically about a minority they believe has been discriminated against, but don’t report too much when one of their sacred cows turns out to not be holy and perfect (witness the reporting on murderous abortionist Kermit Gosnell).
Know what all this means? It means our media is horribly flawed and biased, and so is our DoJ, and so are our cops. It doesn’t mean there is a concerted effort to secretly destroy us. In fact, there is already an overt effort to delegitimize police, and it’s existed since long before Ahmed Mohamed was born.
The public servants of the United States of Eggshells.
Thanks for this, Chris. It was indeed one of the most messed up cluster flusters I’ve ever seen. Probably the worst part of it was Ahmed’s interrogation, in which they insisted that he give some “broader” explanation than “It’s a clock I built”. He was, in their eyes, being less than forthcoming because he wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, which was apparently, “Yeah, I built it to scare people.”
In other words, having gone this far, they didn’t want to be wrong.
In a lot of cases where the police cross the line from careful to WTF, it seems as if there’s some primal urge driving the officers that tells them they cannot back down once they realize they’ve made a mistake. Because that would be to publicly admit that they were wrong. It’s as if the admission of being a fallible human being is worse than screwing up (sometimes horribly) in some other way.
In any even, thank you for writing the article.
I find your speculations about why this happened to be interesting. I’ve never worked in local government, but I know for sure that in companies of all sorts, especially the corporate office environments I used to work in, there is a whole lot of buck-passing, voluntary shutting up, and otherwise what we might call cowardice . . . except for that in these corporate environments people are afraid of losing their jobs. At least, middle-level and lower-level folks sure are. So there is a lot of rationalizing and looking the other way.
I used to object to company policies that I found unfair or ethically wrong & I got labeled a trouble-maker a fair amount. I never learned to shut up but I think that anyone who is scared for their paycheck is going to tend to fall in line. I just wasn’t scared enough.
Randy B makes a very good point here and I agree as I have also witnessed much CYA from corporate management, mostly from lower level management, some power drunk, some so egotistical it makes you want to puke, and some that cause trouble in the rank and file in a manner just to keep their own job security. In my 42 years in transportation industry, I’ve witnessed civil engineers screw up and never ever admit their mistake, for reasons unknown to me. I just wonder if some of this similar behavior was going on in the chain of events. just sayin
Sad and frustrating overreaction, hardly surprising though in an America where an eleven-year old gets arrested for drawing a picture of a stick figure pointing a gun at people. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/11-year-old-boy-arrested-colorado-violent-stick-figure-drawing-made-school-article-1.135628
Seems the Left’s crusade against zero-tolerance policy madness in schools, one of the issues I strongly agreed upon with them, has fallen by the wayside. They don’t care now unless it’s something that they can be spin as racism, Islamophobia, or some other form of discrimination.
In school suspension for a seven-year old pointing a finger gun:
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/01/21/First-grader-punished-for-finger-pointing/UPI-42171295600400/
Another ten-year old, suspended for “lookalike firearm” finger-gun play
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/03/here-we-go-again-10-year-old-boy-suspended-for-pointing-finger-like-a-gun/
Ten-year old, suspended, imgainary bow and arrow this time. Can’t be a cowboy or an Indian, I guess.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/12/10-year-old-johnny-jones-suspended-for-shooting-imaginary-arrow/
Second-grader, suspended, pointed a pencil and said bang.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/05/second-grader-suspended-for-pointing-pencil-like-a-gun/
Oh, here’s one that sounds more familiar. Thirteen year old suspended for a year after watching October Sky, building a model rocket, and leaving it in his locker.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19990406&id=06RJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eQ0NAAAAIBAJ&pg=6204,1576453&hl=en
The madness goes on and on and on….scores of these stories. Don’t expect Obama to take an interest in any of them though unless there’s a race/religion angle.
“Seems the Left’s crusade against zero-tolerance policy madness in schools”
Huh? You must have a different data set than I do because the majority of zero-tolerance nonsense I’ve seen in my experience is coming from the left. The only zero-tolerance policy I’ve ever seen a leftist disagree with had to do with drugs, with a strong suspicion on my part that it was because it impacted an activity they were “sympathetic” to.
Administrators are paid more than the troops to make decisions and take responsibility. I’ve long thought that the salary of school administrators and their supervisors should be docked at least 25% of the amount over the base pay of a teacher for every zero tolerance policy they adopt. The shouldn’t be paid for not making decisions and not taking responsibility.
This was some years back, but for a while, zero-tolerance horror stories and criticism were a fashionable item in liberal media outlets. Sometimes it was on an anti-authoritarian basis, or sometimes there’d be a race/class angle if the subject was an inner city kid. These would be absurd cases of “lookalike” weapons or drugs, mostly, not the insanity you see today with six year olds being punished for “sexual harassment” for kissing on the playground or telling the teacher she’s pretty.
You remember how the Patriot Act made the left all anti-authoritarian when Bush was in office? That was the sort of thing they’d be criticizing, how people in authority were paranoid about mostly imaginary dangers and overreacting by taking people’s freedoms away. Why, here in evil Republican America, children can’t even play Cowboys and Indians at school because it’s a ‘threat’ to safety.
Switch Bush with Obama and then it’s the libertarian right who take the lead on opposing the Patriot Act as well as zero-tolerance tyranny in schools. And the kids probably can’t play Cowboys and Indians because it’s racially insensitive and historically ‘problematic.’
The right and the left evolve over time, these trends come and go. Few years ago, some of the left was on the right side of some important issues (and some of the left on the other hand has always been insane). These days, though, it’s the demagogues and the lunatics who are running the show.
The sword of paranoid ignorance cuts both ways as evidenced by children being suspended, arrested or expelled for drawing a picture of a gun, using their fingers like a gun, or taking a bite of a pop-tart and noticing “Hey, this looks like the shape of a gun!”.
This is not about an inquisition of a race and culture but is about paranoid ignorance and fear in a PC world that is intolerant of anything outside the accepted narrative. Wrong headed policies are then created to keep thought and behavior in a box and use the label of “Zero Tolerance” to enforce it, replacing rational judgement with irrational overreaction.
Critical thinking and common sense have been replaced by cookie cutter zero tolerance policies that fly in the face of a free society.
After seeing the actual device and reading that the father is a crusader on a “Anti-Islamaphobia” campaign, the boy’s motivation becomes highly suspect. Why take an off the shelf digital alarm clock and transfer it in it’s entirety to another case that looks suspicious? Since he did not invent anything new, what possibly could be his motivation or was he manipulated by the father in order to create a situation that ultimately supports his primary cause?
Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s Razor would say that this is a naive kid who blew off the teacher’s warning not to show that to people because he didn’t imagine he could really get into trouble for it. That’s what Occam’s Razor says. Clock boy made a dumb mistake and then everyone else did one after the other.
When I was a freshman in high school, I wrote a horror story about a serial killer for a creative writing assignment, in first person from the murderer’s perspective. I came pretty close to being in deep shit for that, but I was spared by the fact that my teacher had the decency and the sense to talk to me about her concerns rather than report it to the administration right away.
Why did I do that? Because I was reading a lot of Stephen King and thought I’d just made something pretty cool. Seemed like a chance to prove that I was actually good at writing horror by submitting it for judgement like that. I wasn’t imagining that my teacher might react to it as anything other than a piece of fiction.
In hindsight, though, I am glad that she reacted as she did – appropriately and with good sense. If I’d turned out to be some lunatic who shot up the school, this story I wrote would have been a glaring red flag everyone would be smacking themselves in the face for ignoring. She did her diligence by discussing her (justifiable) concerns with me and my parents, and she didn’t screw me over by passing the buck onto the administrative discipline system, which is a Russian roulette for insane, unjust decisions.
To me, Occam’s Razor says that Clock Boy thought he’d made something pretty cool and wanted to show it off to people, that the thought of getting into any kind of trouble for it never entered his head, and that he blew off his teacher’s warning because he didn’t think anything would really happen.
Kids blow off adults’ warnings if they don’t believe anything bad is going to happen to them, and because life would be boring if they listened to every adult who’d ever warned them not to do something. Kids make dumb decisions because they’re naive and impulsive.
Occam’s Razor says that’s why this happened, not because his screwball father concocted some elaborate political stunt. I’m fully prepared to believe that his father helped turn this into a political stunt after the fact, but not that he engineered it beforehand.
Clock Boy blundered into this on his own doing by accident. The media shitstorm afterwards has agenda written all over it, but that happened opportunistically as a reaction to the event. They could not have planned it ahead of time.
And the school and the police bungled this incident and turned it into a shitstorm because people in this country are trained to mindlessly follow institutional procedures and not to make judgements or think for themselves. The training doesn’t sink in for everyone, plenty of people in positions of authority still have character, common sense, backbone, and critical thinking – the traits that allow people to solve problems rather than pass the buck or make them even bigger.
But that is what the training fights against, and for most people it does sink in to some extent or another. Don’t make personal judgement calls, don’t take initiative, don’t take responsibility, don’t make reasonable exceptions. Just follow the rulebook to the letter and reassure yourself that it’s not you who screwed this person over, it’s the rules that did, and you didn’t write the rules, so it’s not your fault that the rules “made” you do something stupid and unjust.
School systems and any other type of organization that wants to avoid these types of insane bullshit incidents (including the police and the military) should reward those who decide on their own reasonable solutions and take responsibility for the results when following the rules would clearly make a small problem into a big problem. And they should punish those who do make a small problem worse by sticking to the book in spite of all common sense, logic, or moral decency.
But of course that’s the opposite of how most systems tend to be run these days, where scrambling through the rulebook to justify your own piss-poor decision making that led to disaster as the result of “just following orders,” is a defense that will get you off the hook, not a condemnation of your moral and intellectual cowardice that will get you punished or demoted like you should be.
As a parent I would be beyond angry and would most likely have to have my wife take care of it because I would not want to get tasered! lol
I wonder if the parents will say anything or if they are immigrants who are just happy to be here and do not want to rock the boat out of fear.
Question is can you fire the officer or reprimand him because for Christs sake why would he arrest this kid and put him in handcuffs. I expect he was a flight risk so that is why the handcuffs but they should have used ankle restraints as well because if he can build a clock then by god he can slip outta those cuffs. He would fashion a firearms out of pocket lint, duck tape and toilet paper roll and then all hell would break loose.
As kids we used to build model rockets and ride down the street with BB guns but would that be allowed now. Actually Chris, I am serious about the BB gun question because is that even legal anymore or how would LE respond?
A friend of my brother’s was suspended in Plano in 1997. Dog hit on a spent shotgun shell in the bed of his truck from dove hunting. Zero tolerance.
Thank you for expressing my sentiments in a more eloquent manner. This is incident has been very personal for me because something like this could have easily happen to me when I was his age. I was never was into the electronic as much, but I had a fascination with chemistry that had a tendency to irk people. Now I’m a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, go figure.
The idea of 14 year olds bringing bomb into school doesn’t frighten me quite as much as nearly half a dozen adults exercising zero critical thinking skills over something that I consider a non-issue. More importantly, those adults are in a position of authority and responsible for the education of our youth. I can understand some Joe-Sixpack from making this error, but I hold high school teachers and administrators to a higher standard.
There is a time and place to profile someone placed on their ethnicity and setting. A nerdy freshman’s attempt at show and tell is not one of those instances. The suburbs of Dallas is not Fallujah or the Gaza strip.
I’ve said this many times with my peers about this incident, but a bomb is more than a collect of wires and circuitry. To be dangerous, it actually has to be connected to something capable of exploding. Did anyone happen to look beyond the comically large digital display and see if those wires attached to something other than more circuitry?
Sadly, I think the school is following what appears to be the new normalcy in the face of exposed incompetence. Double down, hope it all goes away.
I think you are missing the bias here is anti-male in schools, not anti-muslim.
If he were a she, she’d been hailed as the next CEO of a tech giant. Few and fewer male teachers, huge discrepancies in male to female achievement, it’s obvious.
Keep in mind most teachers are not former Marines, current Guard with 25 years military experience and 20 years as a police officer. Many are younger than 30 with no military experiences and their only experience with explosives are what they have seen in movies. A teacher’s job is not to determine if something is or isn’t a bomb. Their job is to say something if they are unsure in any instance. The teacher acted correctly. The administration also acted correctly as they were most likely also unsure. Since we don’t know what transpired between the student and the police, it is also most likely they acted correctly.
I can accept that the teacher acted correctly in reporting a device she thought was suspicious. I can’t accept that nobody at the school realized the device was no threat before police got involved. I also can’t believe anyone thought it was really a bomb, since the school was never evacuated. Did anyone even evacuate the classroom where the teacher saw the device? Not to my knowledge. And I can’t believe police took this kid into custody and transported him, since there is no way (IMO) that they had probable cause to establish intent to trick people into believing it was a bomb.
An unreasonable “it’s a bomb” reaction from an untrained teacher who only knows about bombs from movies? Sure. Trained, allegedly reasonable people further up the chain taking action against this kid when everyone involved knew it wasn’t a bomb, and that the kid never said or acted like he had a bomb, after he had first shown it to an engineering teacher and explained that it was a homemade clock? No, I can’t accept that as reasonable.
Here is the correct video link for the interview in which Ahmed states he closed the case with cable so it wouldn’t look “suspicious.”
http://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE
So apparently Ahmed understood his invention might be problematic. Again, why didn’t he put it away as instructed by his engineering teacher?
He did put it away. It beeped in class.
Reports say he plugged it in to make it beep. That is deliberate.
I’ve heard that once before, but haven’t seen the source. Where is that report? And also, how does a beep equal intent to make people believe he had a bomb?
Because he’s a kid, and kids are idiots who don’t listen to adults? They’re told all the time not to text while they’re driving because it gets people killed – kids (and adults) continue to text and drive because they don’t take the warnings seriously. They don’t take the warnings seriously because they’ve done it plenty of times and nothing bad’s ever happened.
I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the first time Clock Boy brought some homemade gadget to school. He’d never gotten into trouble about it before, why should he get into trouble for it this time?
How old are you? Do you not have children, do you not have to see or deal with children and teenagers on a regular basis? Or are you just failing to take Clock Boy’s age into account as you ponder his mysterious motive?
He’s a middle school kid. They’re idiots who don’t listen, even the gifted ones. They can be smart, and Clock Boy is obviously a smart boy, but in some ways the smartest kids are even more prone to blowing off good advice from adults, because smart kids think they think they understand how the world works a lot better than they actually do.
They don’t tend to think ahead too well about the consequences of their actions either, especially when their actions are going to get the attention and the approval they want from their peers. Any consideration he might have had of “hey, I better be careful not to let my teacher get the wrong idea about this” probably went out the window the minute he had the chance to show it off to his friends.
You really don’t need to go grasping for ulterior motives to explain why a child made a dumb decision or ignored an adult’s advice. He’s a boy in the junior high, they do those things on a daily basis.
I have children and grandchildren, all boys. I am familiar with typical adolescent behavior, but Clock Boy by his own admission knew his “invention” might be misconstrued, which is why he closed it with a piece of cable so it would look less “suspicious” (his words, not mine). While we can’t know with certainty what his motive was, we can make reasonable assumptions based on the facts we do know. This is a blog, not a court of law. Of course, the court of public opinion, with the media’s assistance, has already condemned the motives of the school and police.
And plenty of people, maybe like you, have decided he’s a secret Muslim agent out to put a jihad on America. One person emailed me and suggested Ahmed was “trained in resistance to interrogation”. Others have said he was trying to “desensitize people at the school to the sight of bomb-making material”. There is no evidence whatsoever for these accusations, but Ahmed’s motivates are being condemned just as much as the school’s the police department’s.
That admission was made after the fact, not before. He talked about the possibility of suspicion after this whole thing had already blown up in his face. If he worried about it before, it might have only been for a minute or so. We don’t know what he really thought, but what he said in that video is not an admission of proof and not enough to have a reasonable accusation that he did this on purpose.
You want to lower the standards of evidence it takes to proclaim someone guilty? Fine, but so do the extremists in the campus rape activism movement who see the accusation of sexual assault as enough evidence in and of itself to get someone expelled from a school and destroy their future and reputation.
It’s the actions of the school and the police that should be condemned, not the motive. The battle right now should be to get the court of public opinion to recognize that senseless enforcement of zero-tolerance policies, not Islamophobia and police tyranny, is to blame for this fiasco.
Going after Ahmed is a dead end and accomplishes nothing – the dysfunctional schools and the deceptive, agenda-driven media are the real problems here, and spending all day trying to uncover a hoax with Clock Boy or his dad is wasting time and energy that could be spent against these real problems.
http://www.inquisitr.com/2423721/ahmed-mohameds-bomb-clock-gets-muslim-teen-arrested-over-911-fears/
Got it. I still don’t see how a beeping clock that had already been shown to a teacher suddenly becomes a bomb threat.
There were two different teachers involved. The English teacher had not been notified that Ahmed had a beeping clock that looked remarkably like a bomb.
It didn’t look remarkably like a bomb. One semi-crucial component of a bomb is something that, you know, blows up. That clock was in a small case, and there was absolutely no indication of an explosive component.
Look at the plug for scale. That thing’s pretty tiny- about clock radio size.
It’s a toe-popper!
I refer you to 3 Kirk’s comment, “This kid couldn’t have done a better job of making something that looked like an IED meant to be left somewhere in the school and detonated on a timer if he’d been working from plans….Textbook repurposing of a household item to serve as a timer, I’m afraid. I’ve built things like this myself, for training events.” Do you disagree with this statement? How the heck is an English teacher supposed to make a cursory evaluation of that magnificent thing? How is he supposed to know what a bomb looks like?
I don’t agree that the clock looked like a bomb. It was a small collection of wires, a display, and a circuit board, in a small case, with no explosive component. If that equals “it looks just like a bomb”, then so does my broken Atari.
Remember when the two guys got arrested in Boston for putting up cartoon symbols made of LED lights? Someone just as unfamiliar with bombs saw those symbols and said “Those look just like bombs!” They were wrong, and this teacher was wrong, and both times police overreacted and arrested people because someone who knew nothing about bombs got scared for no reason.
Here is my argument:
1. He did not invent anything. He transplanted the guts of a clock into a case. Nothing more, nothing less. What was his motivation for this? Given that his father is a radical, this is beginning to smell like his father may have set this up to support his “Islamaphobia” crusade. I suspect this kid was manipulated by the father.
2. Remember Occam’s Razor. Consider that if this was the likely motivation, the father succeeded beyond all expectation.
3. Why take a commercial alarm clock and transfer the guts IN IT’S ENTIRETY to an enclosure that would immediately raise suspicion?
4. It is the predictable media that is guilty. In our fear of being labeled “Islamaphobes”, we now overreact to an extreme extent that enables the enemy to work freely knowing that the media and the collective sense of guilt of the left will be their most effective first line of defense. They are giving us the PC knife to cut our own throats and we are actually doing it.
Occam’s Razor being misused again. Are you a fellow Steve Sailer fan? I think I know where you got it from. Steve’s great, and the media storm around this incident is bullshit, but not every incident has to be some staged hoax. You don’t need to prove Clock Boy was in on this as a deliberate agitator, you can just call the media out for hijacking a story about zero-tolerance policy gone mad that could have happened to anyone and making it a sham about Islamophobia.
Why would he put parts of a clock in a case? Because he’s tinkering, he’s not inventing. Perhaps you don’t have any friends who like to tinker. I had a couple of friends as well as a brother in high school who like to do that. One of those friends made a little homemade flamethrower, homemade taser, few other non ‘weapon’ devices I can’t recall the rhyme or reason behind.
Making something that’s actually practical or useful isn’t the point. They’re just screwing around with bullshit to have fun, learn how things work, and make something cool to show off. I’m not too impressed with Clock Boy’s device, but maybe the point of it was figuring out how to reassemble a clock and make it work again outside its original casing, and he was proud of being able to do that.
I can’t tell you what exactly the motive was, but don’t bullshit us by trying to say that this boy’s wacko father involving him in a scheme to stir up a media stunt is the simplest, most natural explanation. It’s not. It’s occuring to you and Steve as the simplest, most natural explanation because you’re letting your outside bias from cases like the Haven Monahan hoax affect your judgement of the situation.
This controversy is an agenda-driven, progressive media bullshit storm, there is no question about that. But this kid does not have to be in on the plot for that fact to be true, and it does look like you and Steve are in this case reaching when you try to include him in it.
Well, at least the story has a happy ending for the kid and his family, right?
Maybe the USG should mandate a bomb recognition course for citizens, so we can all “see something, say something” with 100% accuracy. Seriously, no doubt the principal and police understood the device was not a bomb. There is still the matter of suspicion to perpetrate a bomb hoax. More information is needed as to what transpired on that score before blame is ascribed to the school or police.
A reasonable response to a suspected bomb hoax (and not a suspected bomb) would begin with sitting this kid down in the principal’s office and asking him what the Hell that thing was and why he brought it to school, it would have involved some fact-checking with his parents and his teachers to determine that this kid was an amateur electronics hobbyist, and it would have ended with a warning never to bring something like that to school again.
This kid was not armed and dangerous, nor was he a six foot, two hundred pound guy who could beat down a cop with his bare hands. I weighed 110-120 pounds when I was his age and I have total confidence that fourteen year old me could have beaten this kid up.
Why the handcuffs and the immediate arrest? If the kid was being cooperative, the officers could have just had him sit in a chair and answer their questions. Your average motorist who gets pulled over for speeding presents far more of a threat to an officer in terms of being physically stronger than this kid, having an entire car to conceal a weapon in, and the ability to stomp the gas pedal and try to make a getaway.
Cops face a much greater threat pulling someone over on the road than questioning a kid like Ahmed, but they don’t begin a traffic stop by cuffing your hands to the steering wheel and confiscating your keys. Do you think it would be reasonable for them to do that?
Yeah, Clock Boy’s great ‘invention’ does look like a bomb at first glance, enough to merit suspicion and questioning. That doesn’t mean the response to the situation was reasonable.
According to police, the boy was not cooperative or forthcoming and was passive aggressive in response to their questions.
My parents explained to me in middle school how I could incriminate myself accidentally even if I’d done nothing wrong by saying the wrong thing to the police and how I should not answer anything until I’d called them and gotten an attorney. Do you think Ahmed might have received similar advice from his own parents, or just been afraid of saying the wrong thing on his own?
If he was not attempting to fight or flee the scene, and did not present a credible threat to anyone, I don’t see a credible reason to put him in cuffs. If they felt like they had to take him to the station to investigate this properly, they could have given him a ride there without putting him in cuffs and making an arrest out of it.
If you are “giving” someone a ride without them wanting one then they’re generally arrested, cuffs or not. I suspect the department, like most, mandates handcuffing anyone who is arrested.
I think this was overblown and ridiculous BUT it is possible the kid might have said something that led to his arrest. We just don’t have evidence of it.
Does it look vaguely like a timer?
Sad, but you know … everybody just followed rules 😦
It seems that it does not matter if it is due fear of lawsuit or fear of punishment for law violation or fear of punishment for religion rules violation, there are always people who try to act according some “user manual” and try to move responsibility to someone else instead of using own brain.
We used to have pocket knifes, matches, strings, alive mice in school and … nobody died or was seriously injured due this.
Question here – we (CZ)have special word for people or behaviour who tries to have alibi all the time (or at least for important decisions). Is there some similar in English (dictionary didn’t help)?
Employed.
#1- There’s a LED display on the clock. Do real life bombmakers actually put easy to read LED countdown displays on real life bombs so our hero knows how much time they have left? Kind of like the universal bomb wiring color code so the hero knows which wire to cut.
Stupid Hollywood…
#2- This is more to do with zero tolerance nonsense than anti-Islamism.
1) I may be mistaken, but in the picture at the link provided, the LED display appears to be facing inward. It would not be immediately apparent. The link also provides evidence that Ahmed neither “invented” nor “built” a clock, but merely stuck the innards of an old clock into a pencil case.
2) I believe you are correct that the incident has more to do with zero tolerance than it does with Islamophobia or racism. However, the real takeaway is how the six major media outlets twist and omit facts to create a false narrative reinforced by social media, high profile individuals and powerful organizations.
http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/
Backwards or forwards, LED displays aren’t needed for bombs. Not real ones, anyway. Hollywood bombs need big, bright, flashy LED displays to provide drama, so you’ll know you had seven seconds or less before the hero stopped the big boom.
Assuming one does use an old alarm clock as a bomb timer, how do you propose one programs it without a display?
It looks to me like you and Chris are grasping at straws to confirm the mainstream narrative that the police acted stupidly in the racist U.S. of Amerikkka. You say the clock does not remotely resemble a bomb, but there are other knowlegeable people who disagree, . Chris dismisses Mr. Gaffney’s assertion that Ahmed’s father insisted he be photographed in handcuffs as BS without any evidence or logical argumentation to back up his claim. While I have respect for Chris’ s opinions, I also have to respect Mr. Gaffney’s, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration. Who to believe and where is the truth? I took a gander at Mr. Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and he has a definite point of view, but so does Chris, whose moral indignation is so strong he wants to puke. Gee, if only we had objective investigative journalism that would lay out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and include sources.
I do realize this is an opinion piece.
And my apologies, Joe, I shouldn’t have said you and Chris are confirming the media narrative, just Chris. On second read, you are only disputing the clock looks like a bomb or timer, whereas Chris begins his piece with “Have we not yet realized that just because someone is named Ahmed, that doesn’t mean they’re a threat, or sympathize with those who arr threats?”
Chris is the one imputing racist motives to the school, police and anyone who doesn’t buy into the official story. Those who question might also be terrorists from Tajikistan. We know the drill.
Maybe someday you’ll figure out that Muslim isn’t a race.
Racist, Islamophobic, tomato, tomahto.
My final question: would you rather your own son or daughter attend a school where the teachers, adminstrators and campus police are sticklers in following district policy and law, or would you rather they attend a school that wings it on security matters?
Would you rather is a game to amuse you when you’re bored, not a serious way to discuss policy. We have more options for schools than running them like a maximum-security prison or like the Wild West.
There may be more solutions than either/or, but “would you rather” does help elicit an honest answer to the situation as it stood. Update with some interesting factoids: Ahmed’s sister Eyman was also suspended for a bomb threat during her first year of middle school (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/17/man-i-went-viral-my-day-with-ahmed-moahmed-the-most-famous-boy-on-earth.html) and Ahmed’s family refuses to release records that might exonerate police .(http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleshideler/2015/09/22/irving-mayor-ahmed-mohameds-family-blocking-release-of-records-obama-tweeted-support-even-before-clock-pic-released-n2055545/page/full
Look at it this way. What if the kid in question been a Lutheran named Al Morris? Chances are, this would be a minor story about Zero Tolerance Nonsense or such.
Again, had it been a Lutheran named Al Morris, chances are the people crying “terrorist” would instead be posting stories of how they used to be able to go to school with rifles in their cars as students.
Had kid in question been a Lutheran named Al Morris, he wouldn’t be feted and praised by Obama and others as an example of “Islamaphobia”.
We don’t really know of Al Morris would have been arrested in the first place, though, do we?
Yes, we do.
“Although her case didn’t create quite the buzz Ahmed Mohamed’s did, Kiera Wilmot knows how Ahmed felt when he was cuffed and hauled away from school. Then 16, Wilmot brought a science-fair experiment to her school in Bartow, Florida. The lid popped off her water bottle filled with a mixture of toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil, Slatereported.There were no injuries or property damage, but Wilmot, an 11th-grade honor student with no history of disciplinary problems, was hauled off the school grounds, suspended for 10 days and charged with two felonies.” Again.
It’s disturbing so many people were trolled.
I wonder- what is the correlation between the pundits who are trying to say that Achmed’s clock was some sort of terrorist conspiracy, and those who were sure, SURE! that Jade Helm was some sort of Eeee-vil government conspiracy?
And why does the fact that the conspiracy types have been wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong in the past does not give people what is called a “clue”?
Oh my goodness, name all the pundits who have been saying L’affaire Ahmed is a terrorist conspiracy. Name one mainstream pundit who says that. Practically the entire nation was slurping up the Ahmed story, while a relatively few number of people were concerned about Jade Helm ushering in martial law, although perhaps enough for the Governor to address that concern among others. The media has been silent about Jade Helm for months. Until there is a rebirth of investigative journalism, there will always be room for reasonable conjecture about mainstream reportage. Most conspiracy theories could be put to bed if media and government officials were more forthcoming with information. But then they wouldn’t be able to craft their fabulous narratives, would they?
It’s not the mainstream pundits- it’s the Alex Jones/Inforwars/whackadoodle wannabe tinfoil hat pundits saying it was a terrorist conspiracy. And if you look up thread, a few people here are buying it.
And in regards to the Jade Helm paranoia, a review of the thread on this site shows that Chris, Maya, myself, and a few others were saying that there was no there there in the tinfoil hat “OMG PANICS11!!” being brought up at the time.
You are correct, but I don’t see much difference between mainstream lies and “tin foil hat” lies. In both cases, evidence is distorted or omitted and the truth goes begging.
The thing is, you don’t look at things you said before, at sources you used before, and say to yourself “I was wrong. I used these sources, and they were wrong.”
Look back at just how many times your sources have warned you about some upcoming catastrophe that never came to be, and ask yourself why you are still listening to them. Kind of like setting your day by a broken clock.
What sources, Joe? I’ve never used Alex Jones as a source, nor did I ever claim to believe Jade Helm was intended to usher in martial law. I never claimed to be concerned with any upcoming catastrophe. Please provide any dubious sources I’ve used.
https://chrishernandezauthor.com/2015/05/05/jade-helm-lunacy-hits-texas-and-its-not-just-embarrassing-its-disgusting/
You have not provided any of the sources I used. My point in that thread, which I had to state over and over again as I recall, was:
1) Gov. Abbott’s response to citizens’ Jade Helm concerns was good governance and good politics.
2) It is reasonable to question med/gov. narratives.
I still stand by those statements. If I used any questionable sources, it was most likely to illustrate to Chris and Maya WHY, WHY, WHY window licking morons believed Jade Helm might usher in martial law.
Have those window-licking morons changed their minds now that JH is over and everything is exactly the same as it was before?
Which is more whackadoodle:
1) The Islamophobic school and police were out to get innocent, genius Muslim boy and totally overreacted because they’re sniveling bigots
2) Muslim activist father goads young son into bringing bomblike “invention” to school to discredit authorities and soften them up for a terrorist attack (I assume that is the “tinfoil” narrative you are referring to)
Which theory is stupider? I’ll take theory 2 for like 658 billion, Priscilla. Here’s why:
1) “Muslim activist” doesn’t mean “Muslim terrorist”. The father’s “activism” is that he ran for president of the country he’s from, and when that lunatic preacher in Florida was planning “burn a Koran day” and asked if anyone was willing to defend the Koran, the father accepted the invitation. He debated the preacher in defense of his religion. That’s not exactly terrorism.
2) In case you hadn’t noticed, there has been a widespread, massive, national effort to discredit police for over a year, and it has nothing to do with Islam.
3) Schools are soft targets already. Ahmed brought his deadly clock into the school without anyone noticing, past nonexistent security. If he wanted to bring a real bomb in, he wouldn’t have to “soften up” anything; he’d just bring the bomb in past the aforementioned nonexistent security.
Name one bomb plot where the bombers brought in a device before an attack and showed it to their potential targets. Name one. Explain how this imaginary bomb plot is helped by identifying the bomber to the entire world and getting thousands of people watching his actions and digging into his background.
Like lots of others commenting about this nonexistent hoax bomb, you’ve watched Mission Impossible way too many times.
p.s. I’m not claiming the teachers or cops were out to get Ahmed. I think they overreacted to nothing.
By “softening up”, I’m referring to authorities perhaps being more reluctant to go by the book, just as police may be more reluctant to do certain police work after Ferguson and Baltimore. I by no means believe Ahmed was planning a terrorist attack, nor do I believe he was even softening up the authorities in the sense I mentioned. I’m trying to figure out what conspiracy theories you’re talking about, since I haven’t seen any relating to Ahmed’s clock out and about on the internet.
3) Kid did something dumb, school overreacted by adhering to dumb policy and refusing to think for themsleves, then the media decided to take us all for a ride since they’re always on the lookout for a new story they can twist into an outrage over prejudice and the police. Activist father possibly plays along in feeding the outrage.
There’s your non-whackadoodle version of events.
Pretty much, Vendetta, except I would argue there was no overreaction. Here comes a lot of cut and paste to consider.
“Under such circumstances and faced with complete insubordination what would our Commentariat have the teacher do? Blithely ignore the disruption and extraordinarily dubious article? Would it be the prudent course of action to do nothing when faced with refusal to provide explanations from a surly and passive-aggressive adolescent possessing what would seem to any casual observer a possible weapon? Even had the teacher been so negligent to assume this stance there are any number of school rules, municipal laws and state legislation which strictly require him or her to immediately report every instance where the lives if children are potentially endamgeted. That is unquestioningly as it should be.”
Oops, “lives of children potentially endangered.”
“Because recall, according to the authorities, at this point Ahmed was still resolutely denying them any explanation at all for his behavior. Why didn’t he tell them it was a simple experiment? Why didn’t he request them to call for the teacher he initially met with that morning? (Aside from the fact he had wantonly ignored the prior warning not to violate school rules.) Why not at least attempt to clarify himself and that the entire incident was a misunderstanding quickly spiraling out of control? At the very least, why should anyone but Ahmed be blamed for what happened next? “
http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2015/09/schooling-americans-in-sanity.html?m=1
So I’m done arguing, truth, lies, at this point who cares? Whackadoodle #2 minus the terrorism is my story and I’m sticking to it. Someone else can have the last word.
You know, Chris, now that Clock Boy is moving to Qatar, and getting scholarships, maybe you’d like to re-visit your comments?
I like what you have to say, most times, and you say it well.
But in this instance, I believe you were way off base.
Muslim may not be a race, but “Taqiyya” is real. And Clock Boy and his Father appear to be Good Muslims. Ergo, they can be expected to know about and have no problems using Taqiyya to further the growth of their Faith.
Here are my question:
How does Mohamed’s family’s decision to move to Qatar after the fact provide probable cause to arrest the day of the incident?
How do scholarships after the fact provide probable cause to arrest the day of the incident?
How does the move to Qatar further this alleged plan to impose Islam on America?
I don’t think Mohamed made good decisions. I think his family made really stupid decisions. I think a lot of people had knee-jerk reactions against what happened in the school. But I didn’t then, and don’t now, see any evidence at all that Mohamed intended to make anyone think he had a bomb. It’s telling that the focus afterward has been on family decisions and none on actual evidence of intent.