It didn’t take long for the wackaloons on the right to start defending the arrest of a 14-year-old Muslim student in the North Texas city of Irving for making a clock and bringing it to show his teachers. But it was so predictable.
Anti-Muslim hysteric Alice Linahan here in Texas is using social media in an aggressive defense of Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest. She is especially supportive of Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, also an anti-Muslim hysteric who has defended Irving police for arresting Ahmed Mohamed and taking him from his school in handcuffs. Here’s an excerpt from Linahan’s rambling post on her Voices Empower website:
What we are witnessing today by the media and unfortunately by the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama; as he invited this young student to the white house for a visit. This is an attempt to use “forced equality” based on discrimination and Islamophobia, to shift how we as Americans perceive the world. This is known as critical theory or cultural marxism. This is a clear national security threat because it robs us of “Situational Awareness,” which gives us the ability to protect ourselves from threats both foreign and domestic.
Good grief. That weird word salad reaches almost the incoherence level of a Sarah Palin rant.
In the same post, Linahan also ties what happened with Ahmed to the mythical threat of Sharia — Islamic law — in America:
There are people with varying political agendas who are taking advantage of the revolution underway to fundamentally transform education in America, I.E. (Common Core/21st Century Learning) with the goal of global domination. One of the most dangerous is the push for “Sharia” across the world.
As defined in the book “Sharia, a Threat to America”- “Civilization jihad is a form of political and psychological warfare that includes multi-layered cultural subversion, the co-opting of senior leaders, influence operations, propaganda and other means of insinuating shariah gradually into Western societies.”
In the West a fundamental shift is beginning to be felt, as the American idea of individual freedom clashes with the political purpose of control and submission. The outcome will depend on if individuals refuse to submit.
Sorry, Alice. Ahmed wasn’t on a mission to impose “Sharia” on America. He’s a bright student who was proud of the clock he built and brought it to school to show his teachers. Regardless of whether those teachers really thought he built a bomb, it should have been clear to most folks that, on inspection, it wasn’t. And it’s hard to see any rational defense for interrogating the boy without his parents present, then arresting him and marching him out of his school in handcuffs like he’s a criminal. (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agrees, by the way.)
Linahan, as you might recall, spearheaded the witch hunt two year ago targeting CSCOPE, a popular curriculum package used at the time in hundreds of Texas school districts. Critics made wild and unsubstantiated claims (and still do) that CSCOPE was promoting Marxism, Islam and an anti-American and anti-Christian bias in Texas public schools. In fact, Irving schools were among the anti-CSCOPE battlegrounds.
Linahan had the support (of course) of far-right members of the State Board of Education (SBOE) in her anti-CSCOPE crusade. And she even stood at a Texas Capitol press conference press conference with David Dewhurst when the then-lieutenant governor joined the attacks on CSCOPE. The anti-CSCOPE jihad finally fizzled after an SBOE investigation showed that the claims were nonsense. But that wasn’t before Linahan’s mob and state politicians forced the gutting of the program.
I sure hope Irving ISD is proud of themselves. That boy didn’t do anything wrong.
As for C-Scope, as a teacher, I hated it. It was a gimmick from the get-go but I wouldn’t have done what the others did. For some it worked out OK for others not so much.
Education though is a trendy thing. Madeline Hunter was popular a couple of decades ago.
Pitiful, pitiable poor sick person.
Little Ahmed didn’t build a clock. He took the cover off an old clock and put it in a pencil case. Then he said he’d “built” it. If he’d written this shit down, you’d rightfully call it plagiarism.
If Billy Smith had pulled this, the same exact scenario would have followed, except none of us would have ever heard of it. And you can bet 0bama would never have mentioned Billy’s name, let alone extended and invitation. But keep plugging away at that narrative.
That’s it, KB. Keep blaming the kid who got interrogated, arrested and handcuffed for bringing a clock to school.
Nope, KD, you’re wrong. That’s a digital clock kit like the kind sold by hobby electronic outlet CanaKit. For a hobby in electronics you often start with kits that you put together, solder the components and use jumpers and switches to control the clock’s options. The kit appears to have options for 9-volt or the 300 mA transformer as shown in the picture. Surprisingly, with hobby electronics the housing is the most difficult thing to construct.
One thing is certain in working with youth. You never, never, never penalize a youth for a failure in the program or system. The English teacher failed this kid, the principal failed this kid and the two police “resource officers” assigned to the school failed this kid. Finally, the chief of police failed this kid as did the mayor.
The chief admitted there was no point in arresting Ahmed once the nature of the device was determined, but they did it anyway. They handcuffed him “for his protection” which is total BS, that’s just bullying. They humiliated him, deprived him of due process, violated his civil rights and top to bottom the entire city of Irving should be embarrassed and ashamed of their actions. There is no excuse other than they had the power to do it.
However, Ahmed has the last laugh. He’s transferring out of that horrible, bigoted school and will be drawn into a more inclusive, intelligent and academic circle of new friends than he ever could have accomplished in Broken Toad, Texas. Good on you, Ahmed! It gets better.
I’m changing teams to join KB. I checked out quite a few digital clock kits and examined a jpeg of the photo published. A couple of things bugged me which leads me to agree with KB.
1. The circuit board in the photo is “old style” and I couldn’t find any modern kits with circuit traces like that.
2. The components wires aren’t clipped like they would be if you did your own soldering.
3. The ribbon cable bugged me from the outset. It looks manufactured and old. Electronics enthusiasts would use connectors, not solder the cable to the board.
So, bottom line, it doesn’t look like a modern hobby kit. It looks like Ahmed took apart an old digital clock and cobbled it together in a pencil box.
It appears that Ahmed was just trying to make something that looked cool and what he made is about the level of quality you might expect from a 14-year old.
Yeah, KB was on to something and his snarky little post prompted me to look into the story more deeply. Still, the kid didn’t deserve to get rousted like that and both he and the school are probably better off going their separate ways.
As for Ahmed claiming to have “built it,” it was obvious that at the most it was a kit, and at the least a reconstruction. Hopefully he’ll get something like the Raspberry Pi and do something actually useful and original.
Hmmmm.
Isn’t “Linahan” an Irish name?
So, how are your friends in the IRA?
See, wasn’t that easy?
IF THEY THOUGHT IT WAS A BOMB WHY DIDN’T THEY EVACUATE THE SCHOOL AND CALL A BOMB SQUAD.
The fact that he is a Muslim and not a good, white Christian is what got him arrested not because they thought it was a bomb but because he isn’t bright, shiny WHITE.
The hypocrisy in all of this is best illustrated by one of the bigoted cops who had never laid an eye on Ahmed said, “I thought that was who it was.”
I’ve been a ham radio operator since ’58 when we had to build our own equipment or spend a virtual fortune for commercial equipment.
When I traveled to Toronto, Ontario I carried my 2-meter rig with me. It had an an antenna that rolled up, cables, and – gasp – a battery. They demanded that I prove it was a ham radio. I set up my set and, using a repeater I contacted another ham operator in New York. It blew their minds.
That a 14 year-old boy built a clock from scratch made me proud to see that some kids still know how to build things from scratch. It was NOT from a kit.
What does his religion have to do with anything? NOTHING! It was pure persecution brought on by fear of the other that brought Ahmed to the foreground. I’m damned proud that President Obama invited him to the White House.
America is supposed to be blind when it comes to religion. I am a Jew and have a number of Muslim friends. Both of us know what it is to be hated for our religious beliefs.
Orthodox Jewish women wear head coverings very similar to the head covering Muslim women wear or they wear wigs.
When will this idiotic country ever get it through their little minds that ALL religions are okay according to the Constitution of the Untied States.
Nope. See my post below. Technically true, the clock was definitely not a kit. Technically true, also, Ahmed didn’t build it “from scratch.” It’s a commercial clock that he took apart, that is, out of the case, and screwed it into the pencil box.
The kid’s 14. He built a fun toy. He shouldn’t have ended up in handcuffs and arrested for being a kid.
I was appalled when I read about this incident. The incident is a classic Islamophobic or anti-Arab case of hysteria. The people in Irving have been ginned up by their mayor to be super suspicious of Arabs or Muslims. Both the Irving ISD teachers and the local police over-reacted. The boy really deserves an apology. Fortunately, he was offered a full scholarship to one of the finest public schools in Texas (which has a long waiting list). At least something good will come out of this Texas nativist citizen bigotry.