Yahoo – AFP,
Mira Oberman, 17 Sep 2015
 |
President
Barack Obama congratulated Ahmed Mohamed, 14, on his skills in a
pointed rebuke
to school and police officials -- who defended his arrest -- amid
accusations
of Islamophobia (AFP Photo/Ben Torres)
|
Chicago
(AFP) - A Muslim teenager arrested after a Texas teacher mistook his homemade
clock for a bomb won invitations to the White House, Google and Facebook in a
surge of public support.
President
Barack Obama congratulated Ahmed Mohamed, 14, on his skills in a pointed rebuke
to school and police officials -- who defended his arrest -- amid accusations
of Islamophobia.
"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," Obama tweeted.
 |
This photo
received September 16,
2015 courtesy of the Irving Police
Department in Irving,
Texas shows a
clock made by teenager Ahmed
Mohamed (AFP Photo)
|
Mohamed
told the Dallas Morning News he hoped to impress teachers by bringing the clock
to school on Monday.
'They
took it wrong'
"My
hobby is to invent stuff," the teen said in a video posted on the paper's
website, filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom.
"I
made a clock. It was really easy. I wanted to show something small at first...
they took it wrong so I was arrested for a hoax bomb."
The son of
Sudanese immigrants who live in a Dallas suburb, Mohamed loved robotics club in
middle school and was hoping to find something similar at MacArthur High
School. He did not get the reaction he hoped for when he showed the clock to
his engineering teacher.
"He
was like, 'That's really nice,'" Mohamed said. "'I would advise you
not to show any other teachers.'"
When the
clock's alarm went off in another class, the teacher told him it looked like a
bomb and confiscated it. The school called police and Mohamed was taken away in
cuffs amid suspicion he intended to frighten people with the device.
'Suspicious device'
Police said
Wednesday they have determined that Mohamed had no malicious intent and it was
"just a naive set of circumstances."
Irving
police chief Larry Boyd insisted that Mohamed's ethnicity had nothing to do
with the response.
"Our
reaction would have been the same either way. That's a very suspicious
device," Boyd told reporters.
"We
live in an age where you can't take things like that to school."
A school
district spokeswoman also stood by the establishment's response, telling
reporters that anyone who saw the homemade clock would understand that "we
were doing everything with an abundance of caution."
A photo
provided by police 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.
"My
son is a very brilliant boy," Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed -- who has run for
president in Sudan -- told CNN.
'Bring
your clock'
White House
spokesman Josh Earnest called the incident an opportunity to "search our
own conscious for biases that might be there."
"At
least some of Ahmed's teachers failed him," he said, adding that
"this has the potential to be a teachable moment."
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
that Muslims are plotting to impose Sharia law -- and across the nation.
"Clearly
we believe it's the result of the rising level of anti-Muslim sentiment in our
society," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told AFP.
 |
Irving
police chief Larry Boyd insisted that the ethnicity of Ahmed Mohamed,
pictured
(C) with his family, had nothing to do with the response which saw him
taken
from school in cuffs (AFP Photo/Ben Torres)
|
"It's
clear that if it was some student who wasn't named Ahmed Mohamed and didn't
have brown skin, he would not have been forced to do a perp walk in front of
his fellow students in handcuffs."
Wired
magazine was among those who responded to the incident with a mixture of humor
and horror, posting an article entitled "How to Make Your Own Homemade
Clock That Isn't a Bomb."
Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg told Mohamed to "keep building," saying:
"I'd love to meet you."
Invites
flood in
Zuckerberg
may have to wait.
Along with
the invitation to astronomy night at the White House next month, Mohamed also
got invitations to drive NASA's Opportunity rover, tour MIT, intern at Twitter
and visit Google.
"Hey
Ahmed- we're saving a seat for you at this weekend's Google Science Fair...want
to come? Bring your clock!" the online giant tweeted.
Canadian
astronaut Chris Hadfield invited Mohamed to his science variety show, and the
Four Seasons hotel responded with an offer of a free room in Toronto.
Mohamed's
family launched a Twitter account to thank his supporters using
@IStandWithAhmed as his handle.
"Thank
you fellow supporters. We can band together to stop this racial inequality and
prevent this from happening again," read a tweet that included a photo of
the smiling boy in his NASA t-shirt holding two fingers up in the sign of
victory.
The hashtag
#IStandWithAhmed had been tweeted more than 800,000 times by Wednesday
afternoon, according to analytics site Topsy.com.
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