Meet Ahmed Mohamed, a 9th-grader in Irving, Texas now trending worldwide after the Dallas Morning News reported he was arrested at his high school on Monday for bringing what teachers thought was a bomb to school. The bomb, however, was a allegedly just a homemade clock that Ahmed was showing off to those same teachers that called in the police.
From the Dallas Morning News:
Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.
So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.
Here’s Ahmed (in a NASA T-shirt) as he was taken away from the school in handcuffs:
The hashtag #IStandWithAhmed is trending this morning with many assuming Ahmed’s Muslim faith had something to do with the arrest:
We’ll obviously find out more about Ahmed in the coming days, but rather than jumping to conclusions that this only happened because Ahmed is a Muslim, let’s not forget that schools suspend kids all the time for even sillier reasons. Like Nerf darts:
‘Dumb’: 11-year-old suspended for having ‘mini-shank’ made from Nerf bullet at school
Or a “Pop-Tart” gun:
Florida’s ‘Pop-Tart bill’ would ease schools’ zero-tolerance gun policies
Not Islamophobic, just stupid?
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