14 year old arrested for making a clock!
The Washington Post reports:
Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed just wanted to get noticed by his teachers.
Instead, he got arrested.
In an incident that has raised allegations of racism and made a Texas school district the target of online outrage, the ninth-grader was pulled out of school in handcuffs after a digital clock he built himself was mistaken for a bomb.
Mohamed, a self-assured kid with thick-framed glasses and a serious expression, had just started at MacArthur High School a few weeks ago. The Irving, Tex., ninth-grader has a talent for tinkering — he constructs his own radios and once built a Bluetooth speaker as a gift for his friend — and he wanted to show his new teachers what he could do. So on Sunday night, he quickly put together a homemade digital clock (“just something small,” as he casually put it to the Dallas Morning News: a circuit board and power supply connected to a digital display) and proudly offered it to his engineering teacher the next day.
But the teacher looked wary.
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”
The teacher and school are idiots. If they had any concerns at all about the device, they should have just asked to see how it worked more. But considering it was something a 14 year old is showing off to an engineering teacher (not something that he was hiding and they found), it was taking paranoia to a new level.
“I think this wouldn’t even be a question if his name wasn’t Ahmed Mohamed,” Alia Salem, CAIR’s executive director for the Dallas-Fort Worth region, told WFAA.
Sadly he is right.
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.
— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015
Nice.