At least there’s an upside to this with this and the other offers the student is getting.
And Elon Musk wants to meet him. Zuckerberg also invited him to tour Facebook.
I’m glad this seems to have a happy ending for the boy.
I can’t wait for Fox News’ hot take.
“Next, on The Factor! Obama: confirmed Muslim who wants to blow up schools? Mark Zuckerberg, why do you hate America, the country that made you rich? And Elon Musk, we all know his Tesla “cars” are junk, but new studies suggest they could be something more sinister (stock footage of ISIS)”
Combined with the above police statement, it looks like the Powers That Be are genuinely convinced that there is something that they could say (but won’t because Illegal) that would massively change sentiment.
Now, of course, that doesn’t make them right, or any less un-justified, but I’m really curious at this point what their “trump card,” so-to-speak, is. Did the kid uppercut the first cop he saw while screaming “ALLAHU ACKBAR”?
I’m with most of you in assuming whatever it is they’ve got up their sleeve is trivial/meaningless, but even then, I’d love to hear it, just to have even more grounds to mock them :)
Yup! I want to know how utterly inane their ‘explanation’ is, because it’s going to be a whopper. Do you think there is a chance they would be quiet if the kid had, as you joke, uppercutted the first officer?
Hell no. That shit would be plastered all over the news channels. They wouldn’t be ‘we can’t say anything yet out of respect to privacy’, though that’s actually the right thing to do. No, once the story turned against them so sharply that would get leaked like it was yesterday.
My guess is that the kid did say something suspicious or didn’t explain it well enough as a, “clock.” Or maybe he told another student it was a timer/clock similar to what might be used on an explosive device. Kids embellish and tell crazy stories to their friends. Or just maybe the school has absolutely no valid reason for taking this to the extreme. Who knows. I’m on the kids side here though. I truly hope all the offers he is getting pull through as legitimate and that this story has a happy ending for him and his family. This shouldn’t happen to any student, regardless of nationality, race, religion or anything else. We need more kids interested in technical subjects.
I dunno. Earlier today I was willing to cut the town a little slack because I thought that maybe there was something that happened at the school that justified the cops coming in and hauling him off in handcuffs. But the more I read about the town’s mayor, the less convinced I am that her appointees are acting rationally.
See, it turns out that Beth Van Duyne, the mayor of Irving is a pretty major force in the anti-Muslim fringe movement. You might recall a bill introduced in the Texas legislature that makes the practice of using foreign laws as a basis for US rulings illegal (basically an anti-Shariah bill) illegal. That was her’s; the fact that it is already illegal and always has been doesn’t seem to have entered into her deliberations. She was the leading voice against the “Islamic Tribunal”, a Muslim mediation organization that will (for a fee) come in and provide an outside view into your dispute… while ignoring the many, many similar services offered by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups across the country. And she’s been on Glen Beck’s program a few times, etc., etc.
A great ending for Ahmed, with some lovely rewards, and everyone enjoys their feels.
Whilst the institutionalised racism and bureaucratic idiocy that caused this remain firmly embedded in the system as everyone is now focused on a new hashtag, and are setting up a crowdfund for another unfortunate individual, and it remains all about the personal and self assuring feels and none of it addresses the causes or cares about the legion of faceless unfortunates affected by the same system or situation, as they didn’t trend on Twitter.
I was disappointed to see the Islamaphobia angle take over my Google News headlines today. Just like #BlackLivesMatter, there is a strong element of truth to it, but it’s still strategically limiting. Unfortunately, most people aren’t going to change school and police policies until they think the policies might affect them personally.
This case reminds me a lot like swatting – something that even affects white people! The police mentioned “it wasn’t immediately clear that the clock was not the bomb.” Despite the confusion and misinformation, they thought their only choice was to grill the kid and take him through the only process they knew.
That universal problem is something we’ve talked about in P&R before: the warped incentives of police and other bureaucrats, where false positives are merely an embarrassment but false negatives make heads roll. Balancing caution against reasonableness will always be a challenge for society. It seems like we’ve swung too far toward caution. I suspect that won’t change until all types of Americans perceive that as a danger.
What kind of electronic item is “immediately clear is not a bomb?” Do circuit boards in clear cases often explode outside of action films? Are these cops so bad at their jobs that they can’t filter out bomb from circuit board? Usually bombs include something that can blow up.
This is just embarrassing.
I’m all for the embarrassment and public shaming of these idiots, but let’s be fair. The average person doesn’t know a bomb from a shoe. Show a typical cop a small box with some wires and electronics hanging out of it and it’s not out of the realm of possibility for him to think it’s a bomb - or a “lookalike” designed to fool people into thinking it’s a bomb.
Now, once the kid said it was a homemade clock, and demonstrated it as such, everything should’ve gone back to normal.
There are so many disturbing things here that are just getting glossed over.
Let’s start with this. Ahmed’s English teacher confiscated his clock during third period. Ahmed was summoned to the principal’s office during 6th hour.
Stop for a minute and let’s consider this. For at least three hours, the school and teacher and especially school administration had his clock in their hands. They did not evacuate the school buildings. They did not immediately contact authorities. THEY KNEW IT WASN’T A BOMB. You do not sit around with something you even remotely suspect to be a bomb at your school for a few hours, with no regards for evacuating or taking further safety precautions.
Instead, they tried to figure out ways to screw up this situation worse. I mean, hey, I can understand “We don’t want students bringing non-classroom assignment homebrew electronics to school.” Great. Totally get it. Call Ahmed into the office, explain that to him, explain why, give him his stuff, send him home. You can do that because YOU KNOW THIS ISN’T A BOMB.
But hey, further on into the story. Ahmed is told to make a written statement to the principal of the school regarding the nature of his “bomb hoax” or face expulsion. He doesn’t do it. Good kid. Lousy administrator.
In addition, he’s brought in to the office and there are four cops there, whom he’s never seen before. One says: “Yep, that’s who I thought it was.”
This is an issue about Islamophobia and race, sadly.
Cuffing the kid at school is pretty rough though.
No. You’re wrong here.
As demonstrated: THEY KNEW IT WASN’T A BOMB THE WHOLE TIME. I feel like I shouldn’t have to shout this, but so many folks seem to be missing this. They didn’t need to get Ahmed to tell them this wasn’t a bomb. They already knew that. If you suspect something is a bomb and you’re a school administrator or a cop, you take immediate, forceful action to evacuate an area. Schools send everyone out to parking lots routinely for bullshit phoned-in bomb threats all the time.
They may say things about “We didn’t know,” but NOTHING in their actions taken support that idea. Their actions clearly show that the entire time they fully understood that this pencil case was not a bomb.
The Irving police showing that photo with very few reference points to see that it isn’t a suitcase furthers the prevarication going on.
OK, so what was told to the parents is that the teacher took it as a threat. I’m going to bet that is the “information” that the school isn’t releasing. When he showed her the clock, she interpreted it as an implied threat (somehow).
The school didn’t release that information. Ahmed, in his statement, is the one that said she interpreted it as a threat and said he felt.
From the news story:
The teen said he built the clock to impress his teacher and when he showed it to her Monday, she thought it was a threat towards her. He ended up being detained by police in the school later that day.
“It’s really sad that she took the wrong impression of it,” Mohamed said.
I was only rebutting the idea that any cop should immediately be able to look at that and know it’s not a bomb or lookalike bomb. I’m not missing a goddamned thing.
I wholly agree that the situation sucks and everyone involved (except the kid and his family) were wrong.
Right, but what I’m saying is, if the operating supposition is: “We thought it might be a bomb” or “We didn’t know it wasn’t a bomb”, then the action that follows is bomb-threat protocols and procedures for evacuation of school premises by students and personnel.
That they didn’t do these things renders “We didn’t know it wasn’t a bomb” completely inoperable as an explanation.
OMG, trigger. I was only replying to John Doyle’s post that it’s ridiculous for a cop not to see it wasn’t a bomb.
If this is correct than my point about it being “weird” that he showed it outside of science class is the origin of the confrontation. Not that anecdota makes anecdata but i never remember any crossover from any class in high or junior high outside of sports or band. I never and remember no one ever going “hey, check out my lab experiment, English teacher!”. And that’s where the poor kid went wrong; he is still too young to perceive how an innocent expression of enthusiasm will be taken by an adult as being out-of-context and suspect. And it probably more than anything reflects the discomfort of the English teacher specifically about being shown a box with wires by a Muslim boy for no English class related reason, since she set the chain of events in motion and the school is, in essence, covering for her, and police are covering for the school.