Ahmed’s Clock In A Box – Exploitation of A Stereotype for Political Gain, Says Arab American Professor

Tags

, , , , ,

Posted to YouTube 9/24/2015


“This is a racial issue, this is a religious discrimination issue, and now you have a poster child, literally, a poster child for your agenda, and I think that agenda is an agenda of intimidation.  It think these Islamists want to intimidate people in our country from questioning the behavior and motives of people from their group, and I don’t think this is the first time they have tried this.  Apparently, this group they work with, the Council on American Islamic Relationships or CAIR has done other things claiming “Islamophobia” and has sometimes been successful and sometimes unsuccessful, but this is a technique they have used before.”  So what’s really unfortunate about that is western civilization, our nation, and many others are in a state of war with radical jihadism, and unfortunately, people who are Arab Americans like me and other people sometimes have parts of us that because of our appearance fit a stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason, and this was an exploitation of a stereotype, in my opinion, to advance a political agenda, and I think it’s wrong because we are still not completely safe in this country, and we have to watch out for our safety and the safety of our children.  So my message to you is keep your eyes open.  If you see something, say something.  Suspicious behavior should be reported.  You should not ever be afraid of to report a suspicion of something that looks amiss regardless of someone’s race or apparent religion.”

Additional Reference

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/16/irving-texas-fourteen-year-old-builds-clock/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260279/ahmed-mohameds-qatari-vacation-muslim-brotherhood-arnold-ahlert – 9/30/2015.

* * *

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/clock-and-bull-story – 10/26/2015:

The case that the teen was deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation was strengthened as more was learned about his family. His older sister, Eyman, was once suspended from her school for threatening to blow it up. His uncle runs a trucking company called Twin Towers Transportation. And his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, is a publicity hungry activist who calls himself a sheik, wears flowing white robes, and is a 9/11 Truther. The elder Mohamed routinely returns to Sudan to run as a presidential candidate, and he once debated Pastor Terry Jones of Koran-burning fame.

Update – December 11, 2015

There’s more to include, including a suit against Irving, Texas officialdom, but BackChannels saw this from PJ Media and has elected to run it as a bookend on this piece (posted to YouTube 12/3/2015).

 

Update – August 2, 2016

The Internet is his refuge — and his attacker. He reads every story and long, rambling conspiracy theory about him. Countless blogs and videos have been dedicated to proving Ahmed’s clock was just a Radio Shack clock he put in a new box. (It was partially made of Radio Shack parts, but the design was all his own, he says.) Others insist that this was all a stunt masterminded by Mohamed to get attention. (“He can’t plan the reaction. And why would he want me to get arrested?” Ahmed says.) Still more have proclaimed that the Mohameds are terrorist sympathizers because they once owned a company called Twin Towers Transportation. (They did own a company by that name, because their offices were housed in a Dallas office building called the Twin Towers.)

Contrera, Jessica.  “A year ago, Ahmed Mohamed became ‘Clock Boy.’  Now, he can’t escape that moment.”  The Washington Post, August 2, 2016.

FTAC – Axis

What the Soviet and Soviet-inspired did with mind — information and psychology — has to be addressed and reversed wherever it traveled.

I invite (name withheld) to watch this conversation and, at any point, join it.

The “loyal lie” — told or believed out of fear or want (because people lie primarily to get something or hide something) — has been pitted against “inconvenient truth”, and while the truth may not be favorable in a given instant, it is always more reliable than the lie.

The KGB program had been a program of mass mind control — control of the press; punishment of dissidents; for Stalin, the mass murder of critics — and it was sucked up into Baathist pan-Arabism: there is no mystery as to how and why Bashar al-Assad, with Putin and Khamenei’s blessing, chose to decimate the Syrian state (in area, half lost) and people (half the population displaced or refugee on top of countless thousands dead or maimed — and tens of thousands of those children) rather than cede the assumption of the right to absolute political control or power.


For the despotic, there is not a sucker in every crowd: the crowd is there to be suckered.

# # #

FTAC – In Response to Carson’s Statement

Tags

, ,

The ways of “secular humanism” are like a membrane surrounding religious aggregates, lol, but also from which the same more (apparently) satisfying beliefs about man and the universe may be hung. The helpfulness of the moderate outlook is to blunt the power of a narcissistic drive attached to any convenient existing “ism”, including humanism, and then muddle through in an uncomfortable (to all) but reliable (for all) equilibrium.

https://youtu.be/J9CeC3yrcG4

It’s okay in the boxing ring and for entertainment, but in public office, much less high and highest offices, it’s best to know that “God is greater” or “Master of the Universe” and humanity is just guessing, passionately, but guessing, in any case.


The Facebook chat veered toward refusing endorsement of any “fundamentalist” for office.

That’s fine.

I wouldn’t want a First Family handling rattlers to prove to itself on a recurring basis its own favor in the sight of God in exchange for its fervent beliefs.

However, how available is what is opposite the religious zealot, i.e., the irreligious “secular humanist”?

The quest for that right-for-president guy or gal may be impractical, especially if “secular humanism” is either positioned or seen as debunking all religious faith and thereby becoming a faith in itself.  Intuition suggests that the better framework in which to place a “godless humanism” is as a method — not a faith — designed to manage the separateness of differing beliefs and drives: we want to be free, and to be free means to be as we believe God wanted us to be, or to be as we believe we were fashioned by fate or nature, and doing that means “being ourselves” while also keeping out of one another’s way as a matter devolving to custom and law.

That faith — any — which would fail to recognize political, religious, and social boundaries forged in both the forming processes of communal and personal identity, would seem here to doom itself to perpetual conflict and defeat.


Focus of the discussion: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/09/there-was-nothing-illiberal-about-ben-carsons-muslim-president-comment/ – 9/22/2015.

# # #

HUSSEIN Obama’s MASSIVE Geopolitical Blow Back: Israel Veering East, China Ties Burgeoning. What Does This Mean? Commentary By Adina Kutnicki

Adina Kutnicki's avatarAdina Kutnicki

Obama & Kerry Lie

IT is a given, almost akin to a “holy grail” within Israel – particularly, in the political sphere –  that Israel’s “best friend” is America. Yes and no. Regardless, a basic backgrounder is in order to understand what’s what.

YES, due to inherent common values and worldviews, the two nations are bound by mutual underpinnings. While a majority of Americans and Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly support Israel (and Israel’s majority Jewish public returns the sentiment towards America), the increasingly hostile Demster machine is on the warpath. Indeed, yesteryear’s Democratic operatives no longer even maintain the pretense of being pro-Israel, nor are they pro-American. But let’s not digress.

ON the other hand, the Executive Branch, for the most part, has been a fair-weather friend, dependent upon who is POTUS. However, no one, least of all Israel’s politicians, should have been shocked by HUSSEIN Obama’s overt hostility. That’s a vast understatement. In reality…

View original post 2,452 more words

“Hoax Bomb” – “Not a Science Project”

Tags

, , , , ,

Posted to YouTube 9/18/2015


Posted to YouTube 9/22/2015

Direct from The Blaze:

(9/22/2015)

An excerpt from the interview now appears on Breitbart: http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/09/23/glenn-beck-ahmeds-clock-dog-whistle-islamists/ 9/23/2015.

Slice or dice as any observer may: the “clock in a box” appears to have been manufactured and only the works taken out and moved to the Vaultz box.

Some invention.

(updated 9/25/2015)


“Ahmed Mohamed” has become an international celebrity for “building” a clock, a project that involved no science project, no canned hobby plans, and no discernible reason involving intellectual bravado or curiosity (and none was offered in detention).  That publicity cannot be undone — nor may President Obama’s famous tweet: “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.”

In some parts of the world, a loyal lie trumps an inconvenient truth; however, the United States of America, among other nations, is not one of those geopolitical spaces.  It will pick up the tools of good old British Empiricism — reverse engineering everything; recapitulating the building of the clock — and apply them, and I believe it will take that tool kit into the social realm and the realm of language and language behavior.

There may be more to this story than has surfaced, but where there is additional data to be found, it probably will be found — and where permitted by long-standing custom and law, it will be reported.

# # #

Irving, Texas – Fourteen-Year-Old Builds Clock! (?)

Tags

,

Posted to YouTube 9/15/2015.

Reference: Incident in the News

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/15/student-detained-police-mistake-clock-fake-bomb/72348060/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-ninth-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece – 9/16/2015.

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Irving-Student-Says-Hes-Falsely-Accused-of-Making-a-Hoax-Bomb-327794401.html 9/15-16/2015.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/16/they-thought-it-was-a-bomb-ahmed-mohamed-texas-9th-grader-arrested-after-bringing-a-home-built-clock-to-school/ – 9/16/2015.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34266389 – 9/16/2015.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9th-grader-arrested-clock_55f96557e4b0b48f6701519c – 9/16/2015.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/09/ahmed-mohamed-texas-arrested-homemade-clock-school-bomb – 9/16/2015.

Ahmed Mohamed’s Dad

http://northdallasgazette.com/2015/02/23/irving-resident-makes-his-second-bid-for-election-as-president-of-sudan/ – 2/23/2015.

As mentioned in the BBC piece:

Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who is originally from Sudan, said his son had been mistreated because of his name “and because of 11 September”.

The Mysterious Clock Case

On the surface, it doesn’t look too bad: an intellectually precocious kid builds a kit clock or timer, puts the works in a box, and brings it to school to show off to a science teacher, who, I’ve heard, suggests it would have been better left at home.  It beeps in an English class, and that teacher has a look.

Alarums!

Police.

Bomb squad.

Arrest.

Back home: media attention.  Big time.

Unasked, perhaps, unanswered, so far as one might glean from the news: how was the electronics education acquired?  How was the parts list developed?  Why a clock?  How was the box chosen?  Why?

“I made a clock.  I wanted to show her something small at first, but I took a wrong point of [entry?],” says Ahmed Mohamed (0:17 to 0:20).

So there were or are bigger things to come?

And from whence comes that language, ” . . . a wrong point of . . . .”?

Police thinking as expressed through The Daily Dot:

“He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation,” police spokesperson James McLellan said.

McLellan added: “It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/ahmed-mohamed-irving-tx-hoax-bomb-arrest/ – 9/16/2015.

Updates – September 17, 2015

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/you-are-the-kind-of-student-we-want-mit-surprises-ahmed-mohamed-during-live-interview/ – 9/16/2015

“We’re not afraid of Islam.  We’re afraid of bombs.”

Posted to YouTube September 19, 2015.

“He did not invent the clock or build it, and I’m going to show you why” (333,882 views as of 9/20/2015/1448 EST)

Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015

“And the people at the school thought it might be a bomb, perhaps because it looks exactly like a fuckin’ bomb.”  (203,210 view as of 9/20/2015/1515 EST)

Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015

Haunting: ” . . . his sister [listening] over his shoulder, giving him the answers . . . .”  (1:06 – 1:15).

Replication (Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015)

# # #

Bashar “Barrel Bomb” Assad . . . .

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks


BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.

In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/world/middleeast/syrian-helicopters-drop-barrel-bombs-on-aleppo.html – 2/1/2014.


Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:

1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.

2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.

3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.

“A Special Report on the Recent Air Attacks on Aleppo: Potential Death Falling from the Sky…: Violation Documentation Center in Syria, March 2014.  Note: graphic forensic photographs included in the report.


Posted to YouTube 2/24/2015.

Source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/24/syria-new-spate-barrel-bomb-attacks – 2/24/2015.


Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/opinion/barrel-bombs-not-isis-are-the-greatest-threat-to-syrians.html – 8/5/2015


http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/bombs-kill-dozens-syria-aleppo-150713131000494.html – 7/13/2015

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2015/03/150325072934200.html – 3/25/2015 – “Death of Aleppo”.


Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.

Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10618670/Syrian-military-drop-devastating-barrel-bombs-on-city.html – 2/5/2014.


Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.

http://www.newsweek.com/united-nations-assads-barrel-bombs-continue-kill-syrian-civilians-347782 – 6/27/2015.


Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.

Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.  “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.”  Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.


http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/barrel-bomb-attacks-syria-aleppo-reported-150622175005995.html – 6/22/2015


While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.

As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.

# # #

Link – Orton – Russian Manipulation – Islamic Terrorism

Tags

, , , , ,

Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.

https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/how-russia-manipulates-islamic-terrorism/#more-1722 – 9/8/2015.


Published to YouTube 11/24/2012


Related: Russian Politics Timeline 1999-2011.  Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 2011 (PDF).


Posted to YouTube 8/8/2012.


Additional reference on BackChannels: The Russian Section.

# # #