I have!! But I ain't sharing because the last time I shared my invention with someone that looks like you, I got arrested (referring to my english teacher) https://t.co/B0lgZYLAXq
(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly manufactures, sells, purchases, transports, or possesses a hoax bomb with intent to use the hoax bomb to: (1) make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device; or (2) cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies. (b) An offense under this section is a Class A misdemeanor.
Ahmed Mohamed brought an “invention” to school, showed it off several times, and finally made it beep in a classroom. In America’s “See something? Say something” culture, the teacher felt obligated to confiscate and report the box. The rest is history.
Ahmed’s father is now trying to prove that the city and school district have made, as a racial and religious class, black Muslims fair game for state-based discrimination.
No one knows WHY Ahmed chose to build a clock — or “timing device” — but all recognize that if the same thing had been armed with plastic explosive (very small, very potent material), we’d be chatyping about some other kind of story. As the state’s writ demands the same protect its citizens, sending / bringing a box jammed with electronics into the classroom raises questions and compels the making of some choices.
Hoax bomb?
Maybe it was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
Where should the public set its sensitivity to threat?
When Ahmed set off the clock’s alarm, it interrupted – or disrupted — the classroom. The teacher took the box and alerted the next official.
This small Texas incident took off with the help of the local NAACP leader Anthony Bond and in a matter of days became both a cause celebre and reviled part of the history of terrorism and related threat in the U.S. and around the world.
But the pleasantries were not to be and the communication was cryptic. Could I come to the family home “right now?” It was an emergency. The eldest son had been arrested for taking a hoax bomb to school the previous day. NBC News had just left. The Dallas Morning News was present. How long would it take me to arrive?
Tammy Swofford, the author of the piece, has been chatting with BackChannels’ editor for years. The surreal Ahmed Mohamed clock-in-a-box story that broke in Irving, Texas landed not so much in her lap but much on her virtual table on which she had mixed curiosity about Islam and politics, friendship with the family, and file-it-away-for-later journalism. Throughout the drama, she removed herself to the sidelines while watching in horror as the incident sped into international consciousness with President Obama’s tweet “Cool clock, Ahmed.”
“I built a clock to impress my teacher but when I showed it to her, she thought it was a threat to her,” Ahmed told reporters Wednesday. “It was really sad that she took the wrong impression of it.”
Mohamed said, “I made a clock.” But to a police officer who questioned Mohamed at the school said, “It looks like a movie bomb to me,” according to DMN.
(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly manufactures, sells, purchases, transports, or possesses a hoax bomb with intent to use the hoax bomb to: (1) make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device; or (2) cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies. (b) An offense under this section is a Class A misdemeanor.
Published on Sep 18, 2015 This video shows that the supposed clock invention by a 14 year old is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing. There is nothing to indicate that the clock was even assembled by the child. I suspect this was brought into school to create an alarmed reaction.
So, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. President, Make Magazine (which should know better), and others: You’ve been duped. Please do recognize youths of all backgrounds who create wonderful inventions with electronics. The kid making press around the world did not invent or build a clock.
The Sudan leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Darfur, which he denies.
Ahmed said he was pleased to meet the president and vowed to return one day with a new invention, according to the radio broadcast.
Though White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest suggested that President Obama wouldn’t have time for a meeting, on Monday night the president briefly chatted with 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed during an “Astronomy Night” for kids — though the teen was too busy to pick up the “cool clock” that landed him an invitation to the White House.
Meanwhile, Ahmed has become a villain—dubbed “Clock Boy”—on right wing websites that claim the family has Islamist ties and plotted his celebrity. There’s been zero evidence shown for those conspiracy theories, though Ahmed probably didn’t help his optics by meeting last week with Omar al-Bashir, dictator of the country he was born in and an accused war criminal.
“We are going to move to a place where my kids can study and learn and all of them being accepted by that country,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, before he got off the phone and stepped onto the airplane.
An investigated observation might be reality — at least potential hypotheses and theories will have been methodically tested.
Reality is not political.
From the most clinical perspective, God, nature, and the universe could care less. Such news may not be pleasing to the narcissistic, who most believe God cares about them, often exclusively — and, if malignant, to the detriment of others (this is very personal stuff) — but the attempt to create an impression of reality is nothing other than political.
On the Monday involved, Ahmed Mohamed’s clock in the box was shown / shown off to more than one teacher, and early on, his science teacher suggested he not show it to anyone else. Of course, the clock sounded — beeped — during a last period class, was confiscated, authorities were called, and the rest is now bottom-of-the-birdcage history.
Through it all, whether opinion flew in as a “Clock Boy” story from the conservative press or as a “life’s unfair” (and Americans are just bigoted Islamophobes) left-side leaners, Irving, Texas officials — teachers, police, and mayor — issued no apologies over Ahmed Mohamed’s brief detention.
As the Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed family move to Qatar in the wake of the clock-in-a-box incident in Irving, Texas, one might make note of the effort involved in trying to put a medieval past somewhere up ahead in North America’s continuing democratic, humanist, and secular governance.
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.
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?”
“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)
BackChannels 