14 Year Old Boy arrested for taking home made clock to school

Reasonably serious discussion
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Yup, it’s your latest installment of the States being both batshit crazy and insidiously racist.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9th-grader-arrested-clock_55f96557e4b0b48f6701519c?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067

A ninth-grade student in Irving, Texas, was arrested and sent to juvenile detention Monday after bringing a homemade clock to school

Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old at MacArthur High School who is Muslim, told the outlet he’s passionate about robotics and decided to link a circuit board, power supply and digital clock display together inside a pencil case. He brought the device to school hoping to impress some teachers, but the first one who saw the clock immediately told him “not to show any other teachers.”

Later that day, Mohamed was pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office. He says he was threatened with expulsion, asked if he tried “to make a bomb” and led out of the school in handcuffs by police officers.

“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” the student told the Morning News.

“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”

“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”

Mohamed is currently serving a three-day suspension. The incident has prompted some to claim his arrest and subsequent transfer to juvenile detention, where he was fingerprinted and then released to his parents, as blatant Islamophobia.

Now, compare and contrast this approach - to this:

Jamie, who is 14 on Sunday, started building the reactor in October in an underused science laboratory at his school and five months later has successfully made two atoms smash together to create helium – a nuclear fusion.

So, he went his head teacher Jim Hourigan at Priory Academy in October.

"I had to give a presentation and talk to him about safety, the benefits and what could go right or wrong,” he explained.

“I needed £2,000 and he said he would fund it and also put £1,000 into a contingency fund so that myself and others could continue my work as I would like to make it energy efficient.”

Mr Hourigan said: "I was a bit stunned and I have to say a little nervous when Jamie suggested this but he reassured me he wouldn’t blow the school up.”

The fusion took place in a controlled environment in school before an audience of experts.

It strikes me as pretty depressing that a clearly bright, passionate young man is being punished for following his passion. What incentive does this give to young students to be studious? I also seriosuly struggle to believe this would have occured were Ahmed’s name Donald, and he was say, a Christian. Islamaphobia is alive and well friends.

What do we think?

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It would be better to compare the terrorist Muslim kid to the story of Taylor Wilson, as he was another American who did what the British kid did, so it’s a better side by side comparison…But yup. It’s sad. Very sad.

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Ahmed’s clock:

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Yeah, fair point Ohio. I did look for an article, but I couldn’t find one as easily as I could for Jamie Edwards, and I am lazy. I just wanted to compare the approach of the 2 schools.

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Ah for fuck sake. I still cannot for the life of me work out how to fucking post pictures on here. Surely it needn’t be this hard.

Anyway, the letter the school sent out to parents can be seen here, unsurprisingly it is a joke.

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Is there a nation that trusts each other less than the Americans?

The only thing that really binds them together is corporate practice, the media and the federal government - not exactly the best glue you could have.

The only people Americans can shoot with guns are other Americans or people on American soil. It’s not like they can bring their semi-automatic assault rifles over to the UK in hold luggage. Or at least, I hope not.

It really should be the ultimate cautionary tale in “don’t do this”, and on some areas, such as gun control, the rest of the world learns. The shame of the matter is that the Conservatives nick most of their ideas from the US.

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tbf they have had a lot of schoolyard massacres. I can sort of see why they’re bit fidgetty. In a way, if I was American, I’d sooner send my kid to a school that completely over-reacts when there’s a rumour going round the schoolyard that some kid’s made a bomb. I mean, unless my kid was muslim.

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Just read he hasn’t been charged. Well he shouldn’t be charged for making a bloody clock. He was suspended for 3 days. WTF.

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My favourite bit is Obama inviting this kid to the White House, cos suddenly there’s a million new internet articles with Bomb+White House+Muslim in them, which must be driving the feds crazy.

Edit: Hello feds!

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George Takei writes open letter to Ahmed.

Dear Ahmed,

I’ve never met you, and it’s quite possible you’ve never heard of me, but my name is George Takei. I am many decades older than you, but your story and your experience—when you were arrested at your school simply because you brought in a clock for your teacher–struck a chord with me. You see, when I was a bit younger than you, I was also viewed by others as “the enemy” and treated as such, simply because I happened to look like the people who had attacked America.

Like you, I was just a kid trying to find his place in the world. I loved my country, and I looked forward to all the opportunities and challenges ahead. But my childhood was interrupted by fear and ignorance. When the authorities came for you because they believed you had built a bomb, I was reminded, in a way, of when the army came for us. They ordered us out of our home believing we were suspicious people because of our names, our faces, our ancestry. I spent my childhood in an internment camp because of that fear and ignorance.

But I want you to know, while America may have done a terrible thing to me and my family, and to 120,000 other Japanese Americans, I have great hope for this country, and I believe we do learn. There was a Japanese word we often said in the camps: Gaman. It means to keep on keeping on, with dignity and fortitude. I think you understand this word already. While certain school officials and police officers may have shown you the worst side of our nation, I understand many others have since shown you the best side. I was touched to hear you say that we all have to be true to ourselves.

Ahmed, you are now part of the story of America, and many will learn from your fine example. I see great things ahead for you.

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I am betting the teacher and the local sherriff are keeping a really low profile at the moment. Hopefully that will stay under the rock they are hiding behind.

Whilst he has had a really traumatic experience, it looks like it will come good for him in the end what with white house invite, scholarships to spacecamp and a private school and invite to shows, facebook etc

What makes me chuckle is that there will be several thousand homemade electronic devices taken into school over the next few weeks. It is going to make the American educators nervous wrecks.

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I get your point. Absolutely I do…But the people I meet every day are not the same ones you see in the media or in political discussion.

They are not nearly as bat shit crazy as they are made out to be. I generally meet kind, caring, normal and empathic people every single day with just the occasional crazy thrown in…The trouble is, that when you throw a crazy anywhere, they make a hell of a lot of noise and suck all the oxygen out of the room.

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I’ve got a better idea than most of what Americans are like day to day. I think I’ve probably lived six months of my life over there cumulatively. I insist on at least a two week trip if they’re bringing me over. So yep, I recognise what you say and yes, most Americans I’ve met have been at least personable, if not thoroughly charming.

Thing is, when it goes off, it really does - and when you talk to people from certain ethnic group alone, you tend to get something approaching the truth, I know some right-wing NRA type people. Very personable, and nice to chat to, but sometimes I feel like they live in a different country to many of their compatriots. They’ve got very strong opinions that they are not used to seeing challenged, and that’s very much down to the way they live. They come to work, then go home to a neighbourhood where most people have similar attitudes to them.

The other thing I noticed, both in the south and the north, is that outside of bars, you never really see mixed race groups together. Don’t see them in the mall or whatever.

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I get what you are saying about the NRA guys too. In an ideal world, there could be a lot less of them. These are the Americans that buy into right wing catchprases with reckless abandon.

We see them in around the same proprtion as we do in the UK though. They are not truly representative of the nation. They just talk a lot louder. the only real difference is that the US guys are rabid about assault rifles, hand guns and all the rest. It just makes them look a lot more scary than their English counterparts.

These are not the guys doing the mass killings. They are the enablers.

It is always a problem to tell someone they are an enabler. They never understand the consequences of their actions because they are not the ones that pulled the trigger.

They can still be decent people, but can have a very poor grasp of reality versus their ideaoligy.

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Good to see that Richard Dawkins is diving in head first on this one, conspiracy thoeries abound. Backing up his assertions with Breitbart articles. Nice to be proven right, dude is an absolute garbage human being.

Also the more I think about this, the more I think the no-one actually thought it was a bomb.