'See Something,Say Something.'

muttly

Veteran Expediter
Retired Expediter
'Dont be afraid to speak up'...or something.
An awareness campaign sponsored by our own government to keep us safe from terrorists and other dangerous individuals.
With our history of violence in our schools, teachers and administrators have been asked to be extra aware of anything that could endanger our children and be proactive in keeping them safe. Apparently in this case, school officials are getting blowback from social media, news outlets, and criticized by even White House spokesman Josh Ernest for apparently overacting. And at least some are accusing the officials of being Islamaphobic and applying a double standard with them in our schools.
Article below:
[Bold emphasis added to Ernest's comment and Hillary's comment, as she chimed as well with her political posturing.]
Video: Watch Ahmed Mohamed's family address Irving authorities' reaction to son's homemade clock
Irving's police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

At a joint press conference with Irving ISD, Chief Larry Boyd said the device -- confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock -- was “certainly suspicious in nature.”

“The student showed the device to a teacher, who was concerned that it was possibly the infrastructure for a bomb,” Boyd said.

School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said, describing the incident as a "naive accident."

During the news conference, Boyd touted the “outstanding relationship” he’s had with the Muslim community in Irving. He said he talked to members of the Muslim community this morning and plans to meet with Ahmed's father later today.

Asked if the teen's religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

“We live in an age where you can’t take things like that to school,” he said. “Of course we’ve seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution.”

Irving ISD spokeswoman Lesley Weaver also addressed the media, saying that information “made public to this point has been very unbalanced.”

She declined to provide details on how school officials handled the incident, citing laws intended to safeguard student privacy.

“We were doing everything with an abundance of caution to protect all of our students in Irving,” she said.

Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne took to Facebook to defend the actions of the school district and police, saying their daily work helped make Irving “one of the safest cities in the country.”

“I do not fault the school or the police for looking into what they saw as a potential threat,” Van Duyne wrote. “We have all seen terrible and violent acts committed in schools. ... Perhaps some of those could have been prevented and lives could have been spared if people were more vigilant.”

The mayor later amended her post, acknowledging that she would be “very upset” had the same thing happened to her own child.

“It is my sincere desire that Irving ISD students are encouraged to use their creativity, develop innovations and explore their interests in a manner that fosters higher learning,” Van Duyne wrote. “Hopefully, we can all learn from this week’s events and the student, who has obvious gifts, will not feel at all discouraged from pursuing his talent in electronics and engineering.”

Shortly after the press conference, President Barack Obama extended a Twitter invitation for Ahmed to bring his “cool clock” to the White House. “We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great,” the tweet read.

Josh Earnest, Obama's press secretary, said the case goes to show how stereotypes can cloud the judgment of even the most “good-hearted people.”

It’s clear that at least some of Ahmed's teachers failed him,” Earnest said. “That’s too bad, but it’s not too late for all of us to use this as a teachable moment and to search our own conscience for biases in whatever form they take.”


The White House also extended the teen an invitation to speak with NASA scientists and astronauts at next month’s Astronomy Night.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also joined the social media chorus, extending an open invitation to visit and exhorting Ahmed to “keep building.”

“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The future belongs to people like Ahmed.”

Earlier Wednesday at a modest, red-brick house in central Irving, Ahmed and his family welcomed media crews at the front door and in the backyard as they tried to come to grips with the boy’s overnight ascension to international celebrity.

His sisters, 18-year-old Eyman and 17-year-old Ayisha, could hardly keep up with the tweets and stunning news about their little brother. Because Ahmed was never much for social media, the girls set up a Twitter account for him,@IStandWithAhmed, and watched it balloon to thousands of followers within hours.

“We’re trending No. 1!” Ayisha cried to her sister, holding a cellphone over a stuffed coffee table in the living room.

“It's a blessing and a curse,” Ayisha said of Ahmed’s arrest and subsequent fame. “I don’t think he’ll ever be able to live normally again.”

But they were happy for invitations to visit companies including Google and to move and study in other cities, and for the tweets of support, including one from Hillary Clinton. They recalled how, barely two days earlier, their brother described struggling to hold back tears in front of police officers after his arrest.

0916ahmedclock

The homemade digital clock that led to Ahmed Mohamed's arrest. (Irving Police Department)
________________
Ahmed, after finishing up another interview in the backyard, recalled his emotions as he was handcuffed at Irving MacArthur High School and removed from campus.

“I was really mad,” Ahmed said as he looked at a much-retweeted photo of himself in handcuffs. “I was like, ‘Why am I here?’”

A Council on American Islamic Relations representative then hustled Ahmed and his family off to talk to a lawyer.

After they left, Ahmed’s grandmother, Aisha Musa, lay on a bed in the dining room, resting her feet. She had immigrated from Sudan with the rest of the family years ago.

She doesn’t speak English or know her exact age, but her granddaughters translated her take on her grandson’s celebrity: “I want my son’s son to grow old and have a good job. I thank God there’s nothing people can say but [that] we are good people.”

Staff writers Avi Selk, Naheed Rajwani, Todd Gillman and Robert Wilonsky contributed to this report.

Update at 10:09 a.m. Wednesday: Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidiate Hillary Clinton joined the tidal wave of tweets supporting Mohamed Ahmed after his arrest Monday for bringing a homemade digital clock to school.

"Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe -- they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building,” Clinton's tweetread.

Irving ISD officials and Irving police will hold a press conference at 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Irving Criminal Justice Center. We will continue to update this story as new developments emerge.

Update at 9:32 a.m. Wednesday: After the story of Ahmed Mohamed's arrest for bringing a homemade digital clock to school went viral Tuesday, triggering an outpouring of support for him on social media, Ahmed tweeted a thank-you early Wednesday.

Original story by Avi Selk:

IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

Box of circuit boards
A box full of circuit boards sits at the foot of Ahmed’s small bed in central Irving. His door marks the border where the Mohamed family’s cramped but lavishly decorated house begins to look like the back room at RadioShack.

“Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do,” Ahmed said, fiddling with a cable while a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him.

He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school.


So he decided to do what he’s always done: He built something.

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

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.

The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.

“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.

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

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

Police skepticism
Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn’t believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.

“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”

Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:

“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”

Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.

They’re still investigating the case, and Ahmed hasn’t been back to school. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.

“They thought, ‘How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a threat?’” Ahmed said.

An Irving ISD statement gave no details about the case, citing student privacy laws. But a letter addressed to "Parents/Guardians" and signed by MacArthur Principal Dan Cummings said Irving police had "responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus" and had determined that "the item ... did not pose a threat to your child's safety."

‘Invent good things’
“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. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.

But he wasn’t paying much attention this summer when Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne became a national celebrity in anti-Islamic circles, fueling rumors in speeches that the religious minority was plotting to usurp American laws.

However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations took note.

“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem, who directs the council’s North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed’s arrest.

“We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”

Meanwhile, Ahmed is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters, pronouncing words like “ethnicity” for what sounds like the first time.

He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.
.
"See Something, Say Something" Unfamiliar to Most Americans
 

Turtle

Administrator
Staff member
Retired Expediter
Here's the story from WFAA in Dallas.

I love this part:

Officers said Ahmed was being "passive aggressive" in his answers to their questions, and didn't have a "reasonable answer" as to what he was doing with the case. Investigators said the student told them that it was just a clock that he was messing around with.

"We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only say it was a clock. He didn't offer any explanation as to what it was for, why he created this device, why he brought it to school," said James McLellan, Irving Police.

Chief Boyd also said that Ahmed should have been "more forthcoming" by going beyond the description that what he made was a clock.

I'm guessing the kid kept telling police that it was just a clock because, you know, it was just a clock. They did ask him what the device does, even after being told it was a clock, and Ahmed said, "Well, it tells the time." They then asked him what the device is used for. Ahmed said, "It's a clock. You use it to find out what time it is."

Meanwhile, the educators and the police are patting themselves on the back for a job well done and a disaster averted. And the rest of the country thinks they're all asses.

Don't you have to go to college or something to be a teacher? I know you don't to be a cop, but I'm pretty sure you need to graduate college to be a teacher.

So I guess the old saying is true, Common sense is like deodorant. The people who need it the most never use it.
 

Turtle

Administrator
Staff member
Retired Expediter
wiss.➶ on Twitter

And he's still suspended until tomorrow. 3 days for building clock that the finest and brightest minds in all of Irving finally, after an exhaustive examination, determined was a clock.

Thank God it wasn't a half-eaten Pop-Tart.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Moot and RLENT

muttly

Veteran Expediter
Retired Expediter
I don't get the keeping the kid suspended thing. Once the misunderstanding was resolved, lift the suspension.
 
  • Like
Reactions: vandriver2

Turtle

Administrator
Staff member
Retired Expediter
At a time when the World Economic Forum ranks America as 48th in the quality of its math and science education and the Organization for Economic Development ranks American students as 27th in math and 20th in science, we're arresting a child who wears NASA shirts and builds machines in his spare time, and and we're doing it because the education professionals charged with guiding his educational and intellectual development can't tell the difference between a clock and a bomb. They blame the victim, suspend him for 3 days because he violated their own ignorance, then pat themselves on the back for doing "everything we can do for your child's safety."
 

muttly

Veteran Expediter
Retired Expediter
Many from the left are crapping their pants over this injustice.

Selective outrage:
.
RACE-GRIFTERS UNITE: 14 YEAR-OLD AHMED MOHAMED ARRESTED OVER SUITCASE CLOCK
A 14 year-old high school freshman was arrested Monday in Texas for bringing a homemade digital clock to school. Apparently, he brought it to school to show it off but a teacher, concerned that it looked like a bomb (and not without justification), called police. Mohamed was led out of school by police in handcuffs and suspended for three days.

Ahmed did nothing wrong. A kid showing off his technical kills should not result in an arrest or a suspension.

However, there is also no evidence the police did anything wrong. In the age of Columbine (where high school students really do bring bombs to school) and Sandy Hook, police and schools are required to be hyper-cautious.

But unlike what the race-baiting mainstream media headlinesare screaming, what Ahmed built does not look like a simple “clock.”





I’d love to see how the Secret Service and TSA would react to such a thing. Maybe we’ll find out. President Obama hasalready invited Ahmed and his suitcase clock to the White House.

And America’s Race-Grifters have already started their arson fires.

CNN: Muslim teen Ahmed Mohamed creates clock, shows teachers, gets arrested

Hillary Clinton: “Assumptions and fear don’t keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building.”

CNN’s Sally Kohn: “Hey right wing, your fear-mongering anti-Muslim rhetoric got a kid arrested for a science project. Hope you’re happy.”

Daily Beast: “It took a nerd with guts to stand up against the most Islamophobic part of the country.”

Apparently, the black police officer pictured above is guilty of racial profiling, or something…

Naturally, these shameless opportunists expressed zero outrage when a fifth-grader, a full four years younger than Ahmed, was arrested and charged with brandishing a weapon for bringing a toy gun on a school bus.

Why would they? There’s no political upside for the Left unless you can scream racism.

Then there was the 7 year-old boy suspended for a Pop Tart Gun.



Once again: No political upside, no media uproar, no White House invite.

Then there was the 5th grade girl who was searched by school officials for possessing a paper gun.

No political upside means no media uproar and no White House invite.



A first-grader was suspended for brandishing a chicken finger and using the words “pew, pew.”

No political upside, no media urproar, no White House invite.

An 8th grader in New York was suspended for wearing a NRA t-shirt.

Wrong kind of victim, no media uproar, no White House invite.

A young school girl was suspended in Tennessee for saying “God bless you.”

Wrong kind of victim, no media uproar, no White House invite.

Twelve students were suspended in Washington State for praying.

Wrong kind of victim, no media uproar, no White House invite.

The problem here is not Ahmed, and not the police officer(s) who arrested him (that we know of), and not any of these other students victimized over the years by the stupid and the fascist who populate too many of our schools.

The problem is hysterical Zero Tolerance school policies.

If it takes The Right Kind Of Victim for the Left and MSM to finally speak out against this issue, something the Right has been hollering about for years, maybe some good can come of it.

But I doubt it.

The Left and their MSM just want to call Texas racist.

Cuz…

Grifters gunna grift.

Hoaxers gunna hoax.

Race-Grifters Unite: 14 Year-Old Ahmed Mohamed Arrested Over Suitcase Clock - Breitbart
 

aristotle

Veteran Expediter
Is anyone surprised that people of Middle Eastern or Muslim heritage are subject to extraordinary scrutiny. Decades may pass before the benefit of the doubt is extended. Survival is the most deeply ingrained instinct and, for better or worse, memory serves to reinforce.
 
Top