![]() ![]() "Hey Ahmed - we're saving a seat for you at this weekend's Google Science Fair. Along with the invitation to astronomy night at the White House next month, Mohamed also received invitations to drive NASA's Opportunity rover and visit Google. Wired magazine was among those who responded to the incident with a mixture of humour and horror, posting an article entitled "How to Make Your Own Homemade Clock That Isn't a Bomb".įacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Ahmed to "keep building", saying: "I'd love to meet you". "At least some of Ahmed's teachers failed him," he said, adding that "this has the potential to be a teachable moment". White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the incident an opportunity to "search our own conscious for biases that might be there". Ahmed invited to White House, Facebook, NASA, Google "This all raises a red flag for us," Alia Salem, who directs the council's North Texas chapter, said. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the heavy-handed response was suspicious given the political climate in Irving, where mayor Beth Van Duyne has claimed Muslims are plotting to impose Sharia law in America. The newspaper said Ahmed had been suspended from school, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations was concerned by the incident. The Dallas Morning News said police might still charge the student with making a hoax bomb. Irving police chief Larry Bond insisted that Ahmed's ethnicity had nothing to do with the response.Ī photo provided by police to local media showed a flat, rectangular red digital clock face screwed into the dark plush interior of a silver case along with a circuit board and some wires. Police said they had determined Ahmed had no malicious intent and it was "just a naive set of circumstances". Ethnicity had nothing to do with it, police say The school called the police and Ahmed was taken to a detention centre in handcuffs, where he was fingerprinted and had mug shots taken, amid suspicion he intended to frighten people with the device. "Out of an abundance of caution, we had to take action," spokeswoman Lesley Weaver said. The Irving Independent School District stood behind the teacher. When the clock's alarm went off in another class, his teacher told him it looked like a bomb and confiscated it. I would advise you not to show any other teachers'," Ahmed recalled. ![]() they took it wrong, so I was arrested for a hoax bomb."Īhmed loved robotics club in middle school and was hoping to find something similar at MacArthur High school, but did not get the reaction he hoped for when he showed the clock to his engineering teacher. I wanted to show something small at first. "My hobby is to invent stuff," the teen said in a video posted on the paper's website, filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom. The son of Sudanese immigrants, Ahmed told the Dallas Morning News he hoped to impress teachers by bringing the clock to school on Monday. It's what makes America great," Obama tweeted.Ī photo of Ahmed standing in handcuffs while wearing a t-shirt with US space agency NASA's logo was retweeted thousands of times in a matter of hours and #IStandWithAhmed became the top trending hashtag on Twitter. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. US president Barack Obama congratulated Ahmed Mohamed, from Irving, Texas, on his skills in a pointed rebuke to school and police officials who defended his arrest amid accusations of Islamophobia. ![]() A 14-year-old Muslim schoolboy arrested in the United States after his homemade clock was mistaken for a bomb has won invitations to visit the White House, Google, NASA and Facebook, amid a surge of public support. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |