Ahmed Mohamed clock incident: Difference between revisions

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	{{Use mdy dates\|date=September 2015}}		{{Use mdy dates\|date=September 2015}}

	In September 2015, Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim ] high school freshman~~, was detained by police at school~~ in ], ~~under suspicion of possessing a hoax bomb. He had~~ brought ~~a home project, where he had reassembled~~ a commercial ] inside a locking pencil box, to school ~~to show to his teachers~~. His English teacher, believing the clock resembled a bomb, confiscated the project and reported him to the school principal's office. The police were called and Mohamed was questioned ~~for an hour and a half~~. He was taken into custody~~, handcuffed~~, transported to a juvenile detention facility~~, fingerprinted~~, and ~~his~~ ] ~~was taken~~. He was then released with no charges filed but was ] from school for three days.		In September 2015, Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim ] high school freshman in ], brought a commercial ] he had reassembled inside a locking pencil box to school. His English teacher, believing the clock resembled a bomb, confiscated the project and reported him to the school principal's office. The police were called and Mohamed was questioned. He was taken into custody, transported to a juvenile detention facility, and processed as a suspect. He was then released with no charges filed but was ] from school for three days.

	News of the incident went ] on ], and sparked a debate on ] and ], as well as ~~raising a number of conspiracy theories and hoax~~ allegations. ~~Politicians,~~ ~~technology~~ ~~company~~ ~~executives,~~ ~~and~~ ~~media~~ ~~personalities~~ ~~remarked~~ on ~~the~~ ~~incident~~.		News of the incident went ] on ], and sparked an Internet debate. There were claims of ] and ], as well as allegations that the event was a contrived stunt by Ahmed's politically-active father.

	== Incident ==		== Incident ==

Revision as of 21:45, 28 September 2015

In September 2015, Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim Sudanese-American high school freshman in Irving, Texas, brought a commercial digital clock he had reassembled inside a locking pencil box to school. His English teacher, believing the clock resembled a bomb, confiscated the project and reported him to the school principal's office. The police were called and Mohamed was questioned. He was taken into custody, transported to a juvenile detention facility, and processed as a suspect. He was then released with no charges filed but was suspended from school for three days.

News of the incident went viral on Twitter, and sparked an Internet debate. There were claims of racial profiling and Islamophobia, as well as allegations that the event was a contrived stunt by Ahmed's politically-active father.

Incident

Background

In interviews with local media, Mohamed said he wanted to show the engineering teacher at school what he had done over the weekend: take apart a clock and rebuild it inside a pencil case. His father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, said that on Monday morning, September 14, 2015, he drove his son to school and encouraged him to display his technological ability.

In an interview on Al Jazeera's Ali Velshi on Target, Mohamed said the clock was "built from scrap around the house" and that "some of the boards were already manufactured". He told Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show that it took him "10 or 20 minutes" to make the clock. and that he has built more complicated stuff "like CPUs and soldering them", but that the clock was simple, using some parts that were scrapped off so that it was easier. According to the initial report in The Dallas Morning News, he had done this "before bed on Sunday. "

Ralph Kubiak, Mohamed's seventh-grade history teacher, said that Mohammed was known to have dabbled in electronics in middle school, pranking the classroom projector with a hand-made remote control, and that he also built a jerry-rigged battery charger." The Dallas Morning News commented that "ome of these creations looked much like the infamous clock — a mess of wires and exposed circuits stuffed inside a hinged case, perhaps suspicious to some." According to The Guardian, everybody in middle school knew Mohamed as "the kid who makes crazy contraptions", and who fixed electronics classmates brought to him, earning him the nickname "Inventor Kid".

Detention

Mohamed brought the clock to his school, MacArthur High School, because he "wanted to impress all of his teachers". His engineering teacher, upon seeing the clock said, "That's really nice", but advised him to keep the device in his backpack for the rest of the school day. However, Mohamed later plugged it in during his English class, and "set a time" on the clock. When its alarm started beeping, the English teacher requested to see it, and said, "Well, it looks like a bomb. Don't show it to anyone else." In an interview posted on KXAS-TV (NBC 5), Mohamed said he "closed it with a cable ... 'cause I didn't want to lock it to make it seem like a threat, so I just used a simple cable so it won't look that much suspicious." The English teacher confiscated the clock and reported him to the school principal's office, and the police were called. The principal and a police officer then took him out of class and led him to a room where four other officers were waiting. After interrogating him for about an hour and a half, he was taken out of the school in handcuffs and into police custody. Following his arrival at a juvenile detention center, Mohamed was fingerprinted, his mugshot taken, and further questioned before being released to his parents. According to Mohamed, he was not allowed to contact his family during the questioning and he was threatened by the principal with being expelled unless he would sign a written statement. After releasing Mohamed, police continued to question his clock's purpose, saying, "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

Aftermath

Mohamed was suspended from school for three days. Police determined that he had no malicious intent, and he was not charged with any crime. Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said that "the officers pretty quickly determined that they weren't investigating an explosive device", and that Mohammed was arrested over the prospect that it was a "hoax bomb". Under Texas law, it is illegal to possess a "hoax bomb" with an intent to "make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device" or to "cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies."

In interviews after the incident, Mohammed said that when questioned by the school principal if he tried to make a bomb, he responded, "I told them no, I was trying to make a clock." He also said that he tried to make a phone call to his father, but that police told him he could not do that as he was being interrogated. He also questioned the fairness of the situation "because I brought something to school that wasn't a threat to anyone. I didn't do anything wrong. I just showed my teachers something and I end up being arrested later that day."

Mohamed's school said he was welcome to return after his suspension, and defended its actions. Police indicated that he was interrogated only in order to clarify his intentions when he brought the clock to school. His supporters have speculated that the questioning and subsequent transfer by police to a juvenile center exemplifies Islamophobia in the United States.

School district spokeswoman Lesley Weaver said, "We are never going to take any chances for any of their safety It doesn't matter what child would have brought a suspicious looking item. We still would have taken the same actions." She further said "If the family is willing to give us written permission, we would be happy to share with the public the other side of the story so they can understand the actions we took." Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne defended the actions of the police and the Irving Independent School District, stating that they were following the procedure set when a potential threat of criminal act is discovered. Van Duyne, appearing on Glenn Beck's TheBlaze TV, said there was one-sided reporting of the interaction between Mohammed and police, saying that they are unable to release records because Mohammed is a juvenile and his family has refused to allow it. Van Duyne said that from the information she had seen, Mohammed had been "non-responsive" and "passive aggressive" in response to questions from police officers.

Mohamed family's response

On September 18, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, Ahmed Mohamed's father, announced that his son would either be transferring either to a private school or be home-schooled. The family has since withdrawn all of its children from schools in the Irving Independent School District, and the father said the recent events emotionally affected his son, who was not eating well and having trouble sleeping. He said, "It's torn the family and makes us very confused." While many schools offered to enroll Mohamed, his father said he wanted to give his son time before making a decision. According to the elder Mohamed, the family was invited to the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City where, he said, UN officials want to meet his son. On 25 September 2015, Ahmed Mohamed met with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who was in New York attending UN meetings.

The family hired legal counsel "to pursue Ahmed's legal rights and regain his science project from the Irving Police Department." The police issued a statement saying that they had made the clock available shortly after the incident and were awaiting pick-up by "the student's father, or his designated representative."

Reactions

After the initial report in The Dallas Morning News caught his attention, tech blogger Anil Dash created an online form for people to send supportive messages and offer ideas about how to encourage Mohamed. Dash, with more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, was among the earliest to widely publicize the story through social media, and was first to tweet the photo of Mohamed handcuffed, wearing a faded NASA T-shirt. Within hours, the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed began trending on Twitter and Dash had received thousands of responses.

Following the incident, Mohamed received support from President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mark Zuckerberg. On Obama's Twitter feed, a post said "Cool clock, Ahmed", and asked "Want to bring it to the White House?" continuing "We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great." Zuckerberg invited Mohamed to Facebook headquarters. Mohamed and his family announced that he was going to the White House for its annual Astronomy Night, where he would have the opportunity to meet other aspiring young scientists.

Google invited Mohamed to attend its science fair, urging him to bring the clock along; when he arrived he "received a warm welcome, touring the booths and taking pictures with finalists." Twitter offered him a chance to intern with them. Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield invited Mohamed to his science show in Toronto.

According to social analytics site Topsy, close to a million people sent out tweets with the supportive hashtag #IstandwithAhmed in less than 24 hours. Mohamed opened his own Twitter account @IStandWithAhmed in the morning of September 16 and had more than 37,000 followers by the afternoon.

Responses

Politicians

In a debate among 2016 Republican presidential candidates, Governor Bobby Jindal said that he did not think that a 14-year-old should ever be arrested for bringing a clock to school but defended the police who were "worried about security and safety issues."

White House Press Briefing on Ahmed Mohamed

Twenty-nine members of the Congress, including Asian-American and Muslim-American members, sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney General at the Department of Justice requesting an investigation on "the civil rights violations that took place during the unjust arrest of Ahmed Mohamed." The letter said "Ahmed was denied his civil rights on numerous occasions as he was consistently refused his right to speak with his father. Texas Family Code clearly states 'a child may not be left unattended in a juvenile processing office and is entitled to be accompanied by the child's parent, guardian, or other custodian or by the child's attorney.' (Section 52.025)"

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the incident "is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do", and that Mohamed was invited the White House South Lawn for Astronomy Night on October 19.

Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne said that Irving's police chief and other police officers, as well as teachers and school administrators, were receiving death threats as a result of the controversy. Van Duyne had attracted questions of Islamophobia earlier in 2015 when she supported a bill which would "prohibit judges from letting agreements reached under foreign laws stand if they would trump someone's rights." Although the bill did not name any particular religion, Muslims in Irving felt that it could interfere with Sharia dispute counseling services offered by local imams.

Media

Techdirt writer Tim Cushing wrote that the Texas "hoax bomb" law Mohamed was accused under was too loosely worded, as a mere reaction by a public safety official was enough to fall under it (regardless of whether he had intentionally meant to do so), and that it could theoretically apply to other legitimate devices (such as phones and road flares) because they can "cause alarm or reaction of any type" from a public safety officer. At the same time, he wrote that the school itself may have also violated the same law, as they presented the clock to police as potentially being an explosive device.

An article on Salon described the incident as a part of a "school to prison" pipeline. It also made comparisons to various instances of white males perpetrating high school shootings.

Wall Street Journal commentator James Taranto said he believes what happened to Mohamed is not uncommon; he points to a similar story from 2001 in New Jersey, in which Jason Anagnos, a nine-year-old non-Muslim boy, was arrested, charged and convicted for having brought a fake bomb along on a gifted-and-talented class field trip.

George Takei, the Japanese-American actor who played Sulu on Star Trek, wrote an open letter to Mohamed, offering his support and comparing the cause of being taken into custody by police to the same mindset that led to the Japanese internment in the United States during World War II.

Kevin D. Williamson, a correspondent for the conservative magazine National Review, argued that the media was pushing a case for exaggerated Islamophobia, "because it can be used to further a story that the media already want to tell: that the United States is morally corrupt and irredeemably racist; that Muslims are under siege; that white privilege blinds the majority of Americans to the corruption at the heart of everything red, white, and blue", stating we now live in a time of "race-hustling and grievance-mongering." He contrasted the high level of media coverage for the incident with that of a lesser-reported incident involving the arrest of an eighth-grader for refusing to remove a National Rifle Association T-shirt in class.

Comedians

Bill Maher, who hosts HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, said on the program that Mohamed deserves an apology but that his clock "looks exactly like a fucking bomb." He also suggested that some Muslim adult should tell Mohamed that "maybe one of the reasons why it happened to you is that in our religion we're responsible for 9/11, the Madrid bombing, the London bombing, the Bali discotheque bombings, the Kenya mall...." He continued, "It's not the color of his skin. ... For the last 30 years, it's been one culture that has been blowing shit up over and over again."

In Pakistan, Danish Ali created a video in which Muslims thank the world for allowing them to take their unwieldy appliances, like large clocks and panini sandwich presses, with them in public.

Others

Terri Burke, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, stated, "Islamophobia, and probably racism, certainly played a role in Ahmed's ordeal, but the fact is overzealous administrators, zero-tolerance policies, and law enforcement officers ill-equipped to deal with schoolchildren have compromised educational environments throughout the country. Ahmed suffered through a terrifying, traumatizing, and unjust ordeal. Yet because of the mass exposure of what he endured, he's received invitations to the White House, Facebook headquarters, and the Google science fair. For too many others – the ones whose stories won't go viral – the possibility of the American nightmare remains too real."

On Real Time with Bill Maher, Dallas entrepreneur Mark Cuban stated he had spoken with Mohamed by telephone and that the boy seemed quite comfortable when talking about tinkering with technology. Cuban further stated that when he asked, "Tell me what happened because I'm curious?", he could hear Mohamed's sister in the background telling him how to answer.

According to an article in The New York Observer, the widely circulated photograph of Ahmed in handcuffs wearing a NASA T-shirt, " catapulted the topic of STEM education in America back into the spotlight. And now, children will be inspired to study STEM thanks to Ahmed's continued interest in it beyond all odds."

Clock photo analysis

After the release of a photo of the clock by the Irving police department, a number of commentators analyzed the photo and provided possible explanations of how the clock was put together.

According to a blog post in Artvoice that described the the police released photo of the clock, the device was a Micronta digital clock assembled in a Vaultz locking pencil box.

Mike Senese, Executive Editor of Make: magazine said that they were "charmed by the innocence of the build" and commented that the clock was "less as a combination of miscellaneous parts wired together into a timepiece, and more so as simply the guts of a standard digital alarm clock", and that Mohammed should be proud of his build.

The Dallas Morning News Mohamed said that he spent just 20 minutes soldering a digital display to a circuit board and power supply, which he put inside a pencil case.

An article in The Daily Beast describes the Internet as "lit aflame by claims of conspiracy", and pondered why putting a teenager in handcuffs over his clock was less of a concern to proponents of these theories, than the "apparently shoddy engineering of the 'invention' in question".

Hoax allegations and conspiracy theories

The The Dallas Morning News has referred to some comments that emerged in the aftermath of the incident as conspiracy theories, reporting that most them "cited no evidence, contradicted each other, or clashed with known facts". These included assertions of commentators such as Glenn Beck, who said that "for some reason Irving is important to the Islamists", and the incident was a "dog whistle". Other observations asserted that Mohamed's clock was not just a clock, but a countdown clock and theories have cast suspicion on Mohamed's family and Muslim groups supporting Mohamed since his detainment. Others rejected the notion that the clock was an original build or an invention, and speculated the incident could have been a staged hoax intended to provoke a response.

The progressive The Intercept condemned attempts by the Center for Security Policy to justify the arrest. Frank Gaffney, the center’s founder and president suggested that the controversy over student Ahmed Mohamed being arrested over a homemade clock that he brought to school appeared to be an "influence operation" by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Gaffney's colleague, Jim Hansen, agreed and ran an article with photos showing how the so-called clock was a circuit board that resembled Iranian-made IED triggers used to kill US troops in Iraq. Conservative blog Weasel Zippers brought up information that a Micronta clock was previously been used in the 1985 bombing of two Air India 747 flights from Canada killing 329 people aboard and baggage handlers in Japan.

Anti Islamic commentator Pamela Geller wrote in Breitbart.com and Nina Golgowski wrote in the New York Daily News that Mohamed's father is an Islamist activist who has been involved in pro-Islamist protests in the past. Geller agreed with Gaffney that this incident appeared to be an Islamist influence operation arranged by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano speculated Mohamed and his parents may have committed a "purposeful hoax" by referring to the clock as an invention, and that electronic experts have said the clock looks similar to a 1980s clock sold by Radio Shack.

Other theories posit that Mohamed planned to get arrested to embarrass police, and speculated the incident was a plot orchestrated by Islamists. Conservative national columnist Mark Steyn referred to Mohamed’s father as "a belligerent Muslim activist".

The Dallas Morning News, after reviewing these theories, found no evidence that Mohamed planned to get handcuffed and be in the news.

Heath Wester, the President of the Texas Municipal Patrolman's Association, said that after speaking with the officers involved and Irving Police Chief, his conclusion was that it was a hoax bomb and that Mohamed knew exactly what he was doing, stating that "I think his intent was to see how far he could get with the device and to see what kind of alarmant he could get".