What happens when a child with a Middle Eastern name and appearance builds an electronic clock and brings it to school? If you said, “He’s awarded for his efforts and drive to learn,” you’d be incorrect. The correct answer is he’s terrorized by the State:
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.”
[…]
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.
After interrogating, cuffing, and parading him around like some kind of captured beast the police magnanimously decided that they had terrorized the poor child enough and announced they would not pursue charges. Of course they never went so far as to apologize for their absurd overreaction:
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.
[…]
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.”
Every officer involved with this travesty should be arrested and charged with kidnapping. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of bullshit. Circuit boards along do not make a bomb. Unless there was some clay or other such material that at least kind of resembled an explosive attached to one of those boards there were no grounds whatsoever for anything more than a cursory glance.
The levels of idiocy that has to take place for these events to spiral so far out of control is almost awe inspiring. You need a teacher to not bother with looking at the clock and using a bit of critical thinking to contact the police. Then you need the police to against not bother taking a look at the clock and applying a bit of critical thinking. On top of all of that you have to have a society full of people who are so fucking compliant with anybody holding a badge to not storm the jail, arrest the police, and hold a trail to determine their possible guilt and punishment.
That school doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Hell, this society doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Students that demonstrate intelligence and drive should be somewhere where their knowledge and skills will be appreciated and advanced. My only hope is that this fiasco doesn’t stomp down his drive and he’s eventually able to start an underground company and make billions of dollars without paying one cent in taxes.