Tag Archive for: Ahmed Mohamed

‘Clock Boy’ lawsuit dismissed — Victory for Freedom of Speech

Washington, D.C. — The Center for Security Policy commended today the judiciary of Texas for upholding that state’s commitment to freedom of speech by dismissing a frivolous lawsuit aimed at punishing the Center for Security Policy and its Executive Vice President, Jim Hanson for exercising that constitutional right.

The suit alleging defamation was brought last year by Mohammed Mohammed, the father of Ahmed, widely known as the “Clock Boy,” after the latter brought a clock device resembling a bomb to his school in 2016.  It sought damages from the Center and its EVP in response to public statements made by Mr. Hanson, a former Green Beret, noting the resemblance of the younger Mohammed’s self-declared “invention” to a bomb.  The plaintiffs also took exception to Mr. Hanson’s opinions regarding the potential motivations of the Mohammed family and Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that actively promoted the Clock Boy’s claims that he was a victim of discrimination and Islamophobia.

Fortunately, a Texas statute prohibits Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), thereby protecting free speech and citizens’ right to speak their minds without having to defend themselves in court.

Upon learning that, as recommended by the Center’s counsel, the American Freedom Law Center, District Court Judge Maricela Moore had dismissed the suit, Jim Hanson observed:

This ruling reaffirms our most fundamental liberty – the right to free expression – and punishes Mr. Mohammed and his allies for attempting to suppress ideas they oppose.  The Center for Security Policy will continue to stand firm against all attempts by individuals and groups like CAIR that seek through lawfare and other means to prohibit any criticism of totalitarian Islamist doctrine and to brand as Islamophobes those who point out their efforts. Shutting down free speech is anti-constitutional and un-American.

The Center for Security Policy recently released a book establishing the ties between the Council on American Islamic Relations and one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups: CAIR is Hamas: How the Federal Government Proved the Council on American Islamic Relations is a Front for Terrorism.  The monograph may be downloaded for free at www.SecureFreedom.org.

center_for_security_policy_logoAbout The Center for Security Policy

The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public. For more information visit www.securefreedom.org

Crock Boy: When the Media Get Owned by a 14-year-old

Take the money and run. With the huge windfall enjoyed by the Mohamed family — of clock-bomb-arrest fame — in “Islamophobic” America, one might think that little clock-maker extraordinaire Ahmed Mohamed would head to Switzerland for an internship with Rolex. Instead, news is his whole family is moving to Qatar after the boy accepted a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation for Education. Because, you know, if you’re interested in pushing back scientific frontiers, the Islamic world is where you go.

Now, Qatar is an interesting choice. Its official state religion is Wahhabi Islam — this is also the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia. And like Saudi Arabia, the nation’s main source of legislation is Sharia law (I’m sure Ahmed’s sisters will love it {and maybe they will}). It’s quite telling, however, that the Mohamed clan would choose such a place, although not surprising, really. With Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed (talk about wearing out a name), being a Muslim activist who twice ran for the Sudan’s presidency, it wouldn’t be surprising if these people were “true believers.”

But what I really want to discuss are those other destructive true believers, in all things politically correct, who averred Crock Boy was Clock Boy and dubbed him an inventor. This brings us to the main point, something never quite articulated sufficiently.

Where’s the clock?

Experts in electronics have maintained that Ahmed’s “clock” is just the guts of an ‘80s commercial clock ripped out and placed in another housing. On the other hand, there are still liberals who believe Ahmed’s story, of being a creative scientific genius unjustly persecuted by a bigoted America.

Okay, show me. Barack Obama had originally tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” But when boy genius made an appearance on the South Lawn for Monday’s Astronomy Night, his clock was conspicuously absent. Hmm….

Nor has the media treated us to expositions on the nature, construction and brilliance of Ahmed’s “invention.” They haven’t made it Exhibit A in the persecution of a budding Muslim scientist and rubbed it in the faces of those stupid enough to mistake tomorrow’s technology for today’s terrorism. My, remarkably charitable of them.

Of course, that’s what would have happened had Ahmed’s creation been more clock than crock. Instead, the device has been “disappeared.” Like a magician using misdirection to distract his audience from his sleight-of-hand, the media and Mohamed clan have made Ahmed the story. “If I was a Caucasian male, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten arrested,” said the beleaguered boy. Chimed in his father, Mr. Mohamed2, “Because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

Let me clue you in, fellas: if Ahmed were of European descent and named Alex or Justin, few would have even heard his story.

He wouldn’t have been on talk shows and done a world tour visiting leaders and the U.N.

He wouldn’t have been invited to the White House.

The media wouldn’t have made a federal case out of his tale.

And he wouldn’t have gotten money, scholarships and offers of opportunities from Facebook, Google, Twitter and others.

You know, like white kid Alex Stone, arrested for writing a fictional story in which he slew a dinosaur with a gun.

Or white Texas teen Justin Carter, who sat in prison for months — to the point of becoming suicidal — for making an obvious joke in social media.

Or the kids punished for chewing a Pop-Tart, cutting paper or forming fingers into the shape of a gun. Their races? White, white and white.

Of course, Ahmed had excitedly told a former teacher after his terrible, unjust persecution, “I told you one day I’m going to be — and you told me yourself — I’m going to be really big on the Internet one day.” Even more recently he said about his experience, “I’m glad this happened to me.” I’ll bet. It’s a neat con.

I know, I’m a terrible man to thus criticize a kid. You see, though, unlike most adults — who behave as if they don’t even remember being young — I do. And I know that while many 14-year-olds can be wonderful, some are manipulative, crafty and even downright rotten. And if Ahmed is so clever, why is it inconceivable that Clock Boy could be Crock Boy, a clever little con man?

It’s also ironic that the liberals who now say criticizing a 14-year-old is off limits are often the same people who provide sex education to pre-teens and want to give 14-year-olds voting rights.

I’m not saying Ahmed knew precisely how his story would play out. But it seems that the most charitable explanation is that he tried to impress teachers with a faux creation; it’s also not inconceivable that a boy juvenile could find bringing to school something resembling a bomb amusing. After that, the Mohamed clan, activist Mohamed2 and all, took the ball and ran with it.

Also note that Ahmed has a history of misbehavior, having been suspended from junior-high school for three weeks and spending time the next year in a “reassignment center.” Of course, privacy rules mean we can’t get details on Master Ahmed’s junior-high hell-raising, but you don’t get suspended for three weeks for “blowing bubbles” in school, as his family related when brushing the matter off. Consider as well that his oldest sister, Eyman, was also suspended — for allegedly wanting to blow up her school. As National Review’s Ian Tuttle observed, “Two siblings from the same family being falsely accused of “bomb”-related offenses is, well, quite a coincidence.” Yes, quite.

But then there was the fact that the wind beneath the Mohameds’ wings, the juvenile media, would rather play useful idiot than expose Crock Boy. Part of this, no doubt, is that his tale advances the leftist victim group/victimizer group narrative. And as a Students for a Democratic Society radical once put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Yet there’s another factor: the media are generally ignorant and deluded.

And sometimes downright stupid.

There’s also a psychological phenomenon whereby people would rather participate in a fraud than admit they’d been duped. It’s “‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ — lest I fully realize I’m a dope.”

If those of us saying Clock Boy is Crock Boy are wrong, there was always a simple way to prove it. Exhibit A, the smoking gun — the clock. Where’s the clock?

Oh, yeah, it’s in the corn field with Hillary’s emails.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

The Clock is Ticking on “Islamophobia”

In FrontPage today I discuss the exhortation “If you see something, say something” – which holds true unless the suspicious person is a Muslim.

Of all the people arrested over the past week, only Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas was invited to the White House as a result. This is because Mohamed is fourteen years old, and a Muslim, and was arrested because of rampant “Islamophobia” in the U.S. – or at least so goes the media narrative that Barack Obama has eagerly abetted by issuing his invitation.

The facts of the case are not in dispute; only the intention behind them is. Mohamed built a working clock over the last weekend, and decided to take it school to show it to an engineering teacher. The problem was that it didn’t look like a conventional clock. Instead, it was a mess of wires and other gadgets mounted in a briefcase, and looking suspiciously like the briefcase bombs that have figured in countless movies and TV shows.

Questioned by teachers and then by police, according to WFAA: “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.” Irving police officer James McLellan explained: “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.”

Why didn’t young Ahmed simply give McLellan the explanation he offered later, that he was planning to show the clock to an engineering teacher? This remains unexplained, but in part because of his non-cooperation, Ahmed Mohamed was arrested, and soon released without charge. An international firestorm ensued, with Obama inviting Ahmed to the White House, and a great deal of media handwringing over “Islamophobia.” Haroon Moghul wrote in CNN that “Ahmed just looked to some like someone who might want to make bombs. He’s that very menacing brownish color that racists and bigots associate with either everything south of Texas or some country they probably think is called Terroristan. As it happens, he’s of African, specifically Sudanese, descent. He’s got a doubly Muslim name.”

And it’s true: officials at Irving’s MacArthur High School, where Ahmed Mohamed is a student, ridiculously overreacted. They did so, however, not because of “Islamophobia,” but because of the general hysteria over school shootings that has led principals and teachers nationwide to react stupidly to innocuous actions. All over the country, school officials are on constant high alert for weapons — a high alert that has more than once spilled over into outright hysteria, with students being suspended for drawing guns, pointing fingers at people and saying ‘Bang,’ etc. Then there was Josh Welch, the kid who got in trouble for chewing his pop-tart into the shape of a gun. Josh Welch never got invited to the White House.

Josh Welch and the other children who have fallen victim to this hysteria didn’t run afoul of school administrators because they were Muslims — none of them were. They found themselves in hot water because administrators are so very afraid that their school will be the site of the next shooting that they leap on and magnify the smallest matters. Would Ahmed Mohamed’s clock have been suspicious if he were a white Methodist, and would he have been arrested anyway? Without any doubt. But his arrest has become an opportunity for the purveyors of the Muslims-as-victims myth, among whom Haroon Moghul is a leading propagandist, to push hard on their spurious and insidious claim that Muslims are suffering from unwarranted scrutiny, including counter-terror programs, which should accordingly be relaxed or scrapped altogether.

That will be the result of the apotheosis of Ahmed Mohamed to Exalted Victim Status. Ahmed Mohamed will most likely be the Rosa Parks of the counter-counter-terror movement. Because of this young man and his clock, Muslim students will henceforth be exempted from scrutiny for bringing suspicious objects to school: to subject them to such scrutiny would be “Islamophobic,” clearly an act of racism against “brown people.”

Because of this incident, the clock is now ticking on “Islamophobia” – that is, on reasonable scrutiny of Muslims behaving suspiciously. Such scrutiny is on its way out. And so it could happen some day: a young Muslim just as intelligent and enterprising as Ahmed Mohamed will spend a weekend building a bomb instead of a clock, and carry it with him to school on Monday morning. School officials, if they see it, will not dare utter a word of protest: they will have learned the lesson of Ahmed Mohamed, that young “brown” Muslim boys with suspicious objects are not to be questioned unless the questioner wants to be excoriated in the media and lose his job.

When that bomb goes off, will anyone recall the silly incident in the late summer of 2015 that paved the way for it, and how the President of the United States himself made it all possible? Or will they be too preoccupied with the bloody carnage to remember?

RELATED ARTICLE: Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison carries clock in solidarity with Ahmed Mohamed