Also, that suitcase is likely bent because if you read the story, it sounds like Ahmed is a classic tinkerer. His bedroom is full of circuit boards, parts, soldering irons, and other stuff. If you’ve ever been to the workspace of a maker, the surprise wouldn’t be the dented suitcase, it’d be if it wasn’t on about it’s fifth owner and 17th use.
He used it because he needed something easy to carry the clock–which is just a circuit board, a controller, and an LED readout–and to house it. The stuff he used fit.
He never said it was anything but a clock. Because it was a clock.
As a sage observer on twitter pointed out, this wasn’t because Ahmed made something that looks like a bomb. This is all because someone decided that Ahmed himself looks like a kid who makes bombs.
I’m not defending this! But it puts a slightly different context. When i first heard about the story I thought it was a round wall clock at which point it’s despicable. It’s only a tiny bit less despicable now and apparently not even a suitcase. But still, it’s a ticking box, and many high school administrators are if anything reliably mediocre seeing their schools as part daycare and part prison. Suspending him is just CYA, whatever their justification after they discovered the truth.
My favorite quote from the original article on this particular theme:
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.
Honestly, the entire article is full of some real phrasing gems. Particularly this one:
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president.
Just casually dropping that the kid’s dad occasionally runs for president while on vacation in the Sudan is fucking great. (Mind you, it’s a hobby at best. al-Bashir’s comfortably been military dictator/president-for-life since the late 80s)
Re: School administrators/police thinking there was a genuine threat, it’s worth noting that at no point did they attempt to clear the school or secure the object in a way that you would with say, a fucking bomb. The police were describing the potential charges as being for making a “hoax bomb” before deciding to drop them today. Basically, everyone acknowledged that it wasn’t a bomb or a risk, and have acknowledged that he never claimed it was a bomb or indeed did anything other than repeatedly declare it was a clock. . . but they still decided to throw him in juvie because they saw it as overly bomb-like (although not bomb-like enough to treat as a threat, of course).
You can understand why one Balkan tribe hates another Balkan tribe in the context of their own existence without supporting it. I just wanted to know WHY this poor kid and that’s the reason, a ticking box they thought looked like a bomb. They didn’t just randomly call the police for having a middle eastern name. That doesn’t make it right or justifiable, but it does explain.
Roger Ebert’s Armageddon review should be reason enough for anyone with even a smidgen of intelligence to know that BOMBS DO NOT HAVE BIG RED LED READOUTS.
As bad as they are they didn’t call because a kid with a Muslim name shows up at class one day literally. They did throw him under the [school] bus because of his name when they had a “problem” involving him, that’s absolutely true.
I don’t think it was wrong of the teacher to call the administers. The clock is unusual and it’s beyond his/her pay grade to decide.
I think it’s stupid but not bat shit crazy for the administrators to call the cops to come check it out. Again, still fairly unusual and beyond their expertise. Either way, they should have called his parents, though.
I think it’s bat shit crazy that the cops arrested him. Questioned him? Sure. Inspect the clock? Sure. Hell, even putting the clock out in the middle of the field and calling in the bomb squad to check it out would be aggressive, but not crazy. There is no probable cause for arrest here, though. Zip, zero, none.
“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed. If you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you.”
Unfortunately, the information that has been made public to this point is very unbalanced. We would provide additional factual information about the situation; however, we feel it’s important to protect the student’s right to privacy and we will abide by FERPA, the federal law that protects student information. If the family grants us written permission to release information, we will be happy to provide additional facts to the media at that time.
