It's time for a mea culpa. I was wrong - twice.
I was wrong back when the Ahmed clock story broke. I believed he was a gifted kid who designed his own clock and only took it to school to show it off to his science teacher. I liked every pro-Ahmed post I saw on facebook including the posts that announced he'd been invited to the White House to show off his clock. I was wrong to accept the Ahmed clock story at face value.
I was wrong a second time when I didn't criticize Ahmed and his family a few months ago. Shortly after the Ahmed clock story broke, it became clear to me that Ahmed and his family had engaged in a sting operation to catch islamophobes and racists. The people that were caught by this sting certainly were islamophobes and racists, but that didn't make the entrapment Ahmed's family engaged in right. This made me unconformable, but I didn't post anything on social media about it. My only defense is that I didn't want to do anything that would make it look like I was defending the racists* involved in the Ahmed clock incident, and while I strongly disagreed with the method used by Ahmed's family, I wasn't going to raise a big stink about a couple of racists being publicly shamed.
* From this point forward in this post, I'm just going to use the term "racists" as shorthand for "islamophobic racists". I think racism and islamophobia are often two side of the same coin anyway, and in the Ahmed clock incident I doubt very much that a white muslim would have been arrested for doing the same thing Ahmed did.
However, it was wrong of me not to speak out about this, a point that was driven home in my mind by the news that Ahmed's family is demanding $15 million dollars from Irving, Texas and its independent school district. If I had even the smallest doubt about the motives of Ahmed's family, they were washed away by the news of the $15 million demand.
Now, before I go on, let me make something absolutely clear to my readers - the vast majority of whom are as liberal as I am. I am in no way defending the actions of the teachers/administrators in Ahmed's school or the Irving police. The fact that Ahmed wound up being led away in handcuffs is absolutely ridiculous. While I actually do believe that the teacher who fell for Ahmed's sting operation sincerely had an irrational fear that the clock might be a bomb, it's clear that the administrators of the school and the police did not think the clock was a bomb. The school was not evacuated, the bomb squad was not called in, and the police drove Ahmed and his clock to the police station. It seems that nobody in any position of authority thought that this clock was threat. Perhaps they thought Ahmed was trying to play a trick on them ( which I believe he was ) and wanted to make an example out of him, but they made an example out of him for racists reasons. The school administrators and police definitely would not have reacted this way if he was a white non-muslim kid, and they probably would not have reacted this way even if he was a white muslim kid. It was definitely wrong for the school administrators and the police to react the way they did, and their reaction underscored the problems this nation has with racism and islamophobia. That being said, Ahmed and his family were wrong to set a trap for the racists and islamaphobes.
Because there's no way getting around it - this was a trap.
Oh, I didn't realize it at first. At first, I reacted the way most liberals did; I was excited by the Ahmed clock story. It's a little embarrassing to admit this, because nobody should ever feel happy about story that includes an innocent kid being hauled off to jail, but this story actually filled me with glee. It had everything that liberals love; it was like raw meat being thrown to a bunch of lions. It had islamophobia. It had racist islamophobia! In the south. In Texas! To top it all off, it had racist cops persecuting a member of an ethnic and religious minority. Seriously, in the minds of most liberals at the time, this story was awesome. It confirmed a lot of liberal folk's negative assumptions about the south, about Texas, and about racism in policing. And then the President invited him to the White House, Mark Zuckerberg invited him to facebook, and MIT practically told him they had a spot waiting for him. We all loved this - we all were pumped up to #StandWithAhmed and show all those racists how wrong they were.
And while the racists certainly were wrong, most of us ( including me ) were too blinded by our excitement about the story to see that Amhed's narrative was a lie. It's pretty easy to see that Ahmed wasn't an innocent kid who just wanted to to impress his science teacher. All you you really need to see the truth is the video below and some common sense.
I had initially believed that Ahmed had hooked up circuits by hand to create his own clock. While this certainly wouldn't have qualified as an "invention" ( which is what Ahmed called his clock ), it would have been an impressive project that any 14-year-old should have been proud to show his science teacher.
However, that's not what Ahmed did. As the video above shows, his clock "invention" was simply the result of taking the innards of a store-bought clock out of its casing and mounting them in a pencil case shaped like a briefcase. This isn't a project any kid should have been proud to show a science teacher. All you are really showing off by doing this project is your ability to use a screwdriver. If I was a science teacher and a kid presented this clock to me as an original project, I would give that kid a failing grade. There's really no chance in hell that Ahmed was bringing that clock to school to impress his science teacher. There's was nothing impressive about that clock project. He took a perfectly good clock and made it worse. If you walked around with that pencil case clock open, the innards of the clock would dangle out and be exposed to damage, and if you closed the case to protect the innards, there's no way you could read the display of the clock.
So, if you accept that there's no way Ahmed brought that shitty clock project to school to impress his science teacher, you needed to ask yourself why he really brought it to school. You also have to ask yourself why he mounted the clock in a pencil case that looked like a briefcase. I've heard a lot a liberals protest that the clock was mounted in a pencil case, but not a briefcase, but c'mon, that pencil case looks like a little briefcase. I've seen a lot a pencil cases in my day, and none of them looked as much like a briefcase as the pencil case used for Ahmed's clock. If you don't think that Ahmed chose a pencil case that looked like a briefcase for a reason, you're just being naive. After Ahmed showed the science teacher the clock, he bought out the clock in other classes after that. The teacher who feared the clock was a bomb said she noticed the clocked because it beeped. Why was Ahmed taking the clock out in every class? Why did he have the clock turned on at all ( with the alarm ready to beep, apparently ) after he was done with science class. My common sense tells me he was fishing - fishing for racists. It took a while, but eventually he hooked one, and the rest is history.
Earlier in the is post I had accused Ahmed and his family of being the type of people who would run a sting operation. Now that I've thought about it a bit while writing this post, I've decide that they are worse than that. They're con men. They conned almost all of us into believing that Ahmed is just some innocent young genius who wanted to impress his science teacher, and now they are going to try to con a jury into giving them $15 million. I hope this con doesn't work, and liberals who care about fairness and justice should speak out against this con. If Ahmed's family wins $15 millions dollars in a lawsuit, I think it would be an insult to all the truly innocent victims of racism in this country's history.
Racism and Islamaphobia are big problems. Lots of people have people have harmed by it and deserve compensation. If class-action lawsuit awarded a trillion dollars to victims of racism in this country, I'd have no problem with it - as long as that little con man Ahmed doesn't get a cent.
Rich
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