“Tortured”? Ridiculous. But no one, of course, is calling him on it. On the contrary: “The White House said Ahmed was invited to participate in an astronomy night next month. The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the Obama administration thought the boy was failed by his teachers and called the incident a ‘teachable moment.'” And what it teaches is that if a young Muslim comes to school with a suspicious device, school officials must not do anything, for to take any action would be “Islamophobic.”
Ahmed Mohamed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, has for years tried to position himself as a fighter against “Islamophobia.” I debated him a few years ago, with results so bad for him that after the debate, The American Muslim pleaded with Muslims not to debate me. The video is not online right now but I am told it will be put back up today, and I will post it when I receive it.
“Texas schoolboy arrested over clock to visit Obama as authorities defend action,” by Jessica Glenza and Nicky Woolf, Guardian, September 17, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
…After his story swept across the internet and drew messages of support from tech companies and the US president, Ahmed told reporters outside his home on Wednesday: “I built the clock to impress my teacher, but when I showed it to her she thought it was a threat to her. It was really sad that she took a wrong impression of it.”
He said he was still suspended until Thursday and was thinking of transferring to a different school.
Wearing a Nasa T-shirt, Ahmed thanked his supporters on social media, as well as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. There was a cheer when he announced that he would be visiting the White House.
The White House said Ahmed was invited to participate in an astronomy night next month. The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the Obama administration thought the boy was failed by his teachers and called the incident a “teachable moment”.
Ahmed’s father and sister thanked the boy’s many online supporters. But Ahmed’s father also expressed his anger at his son’s treatment. “My kid was hurt and was tortured and arrested and mistreated in front of his friends inside of the school,” he said. “That is not America. That is not like us. We love to be in Irving, Texas. We love it and we love our people here.”
On Wednesday, an Irving independent school district spokeswoman, Lesley Weaver, defended the school’s decision to arrest Ahmed under Texas’s “hoax bomb” statute after an English teacher reported the “suspicious” device to administrators.
“We will always take necessary precautions to protect our students and to keep our school community as safe as possible,” Weaver said. She added that members of the public appeared upset because they hadn’t seen photos of the “suspicious-looking item in question”.
“Perhaps upon release of that photo there may be a little bit different perception about what took place, and people might have a better understanding of how we were doing everything with an abundance of caution to protect all of our students in Irving,” Weaver said.
The Irving chief of police, Larry Boyd, supported Weaver’s belief that photos of the device would clear up the controversy. A photograph of the homemade clock was passed out to reporters, and Boyd said that “it shows that it certainly was suspicious in nature”….