When Is a Clock Not a Clock?

The "perp"

When some English teacher thinks it's a bomb. I'm sure you've been reading about Ahmed Mohamed, the fourteen-year-old kid with a passion for inventing things who was arrested for bringing a "hoax bomb" to school. Here's the after-the-fact face-saving by the police chief:

Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

At a joint press conference with Irving ISD, Chief Larry Boyd said the device — confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock — was “certainly suspicious in nature.”

School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said, describing the incident as a “naive accident.”

Original reports noted that the officers questioning Ahmed felt he was "not forthcoming" when he kept insisting it was a clock. Maybe that's because it was -- a clock.

Digby has a must-read post on the climate that makes this kind of stupidity not only possible, but inevitable:

This is, of course a direct outgrowth of the paranoia and nativism that's been with us since 9/11. I wrote about how we reacted to 9/11 in this piece for Salon yesterday and I highlighted this 2002 article by Peggy Noonan that speaks directly to this attitude:

“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt. And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.”

You may recall that as the "Shoney's incident" where a middle aged white woman from Georgia got panicked at the sight of 3 "Middle eastern looking" medical students eating and joking around in a restaurant and called the police who instigated a three state manhunt. The students were detained for more than 17 hours and lost their medical residencies at the Florida hospital to which they were enroute. Jeb Bush called the woman to commend her for her sharp observation skills. It was widely celebrated on the right as you can see by Noonan's ugly screed.

Of course, one has to take anything from Noonan with a grain of salt -- or a quart of gin -- but it's indicative of an attitude on the right, and in this instance, we are talking about the right, also known as Texas.

Digby picks up on this insight from Glenn Greenwald:

There are sprawling industries and self-proclaimed career “terrorism experts” in the U.S. that profit greatly by deliberately exaggerating the threat of Terrorism and keeping Americans in a state of abject fear of “radical Islam.” There are all sorts of polemicists who build their public platforms by demonizing Muslims and scoffing at concerns over “Islamaphobia,” with the most toxic ones insisting that such a thing does not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country, or even as they are physically attacked.

Back to the reaction of the teachers and police: there really is no excuse for this level of stupidity and lack of mature judgment. I suppose this is what happens when you start labeling critical thinking skills as a bad thing. And then, there's the fact that the boy is Muslim: this statement by the police chief reeks of bulshit:

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

But don't take guns away from white boys.

But I digress: Greenwald has a very good point: there are interests who are accumulating a lot of power and money by keeping us scared shitless. And they keep building on it: witness this exchange between Jeb! and The Donald:

“Your brother and your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama,” Mr. Trump taunted the former Florida governor. “It was such a disaster those last three months [of George W. Bush’s administration] that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected.”

Jeb Bush retorted, “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure: he kept us safe.” The audience at the debate cheered.

“You remember the rubble [at the World Trade Center]?” Mr. Bush asked. “He sent a clear signal that the United States would be strong, and fight Islamic terrorism, and he did keep us safe.”

Mr. Trump replied, “You feel safe right now? I don’t feel so safe.”

And there you have the whole syndrome.

I read stories like this and I think about my neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, which has a large Muslim population -- Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, Arab, African -- as well as Latinos, African-Americans, Vietnamese, Russians, and even plain old white-bread American mongrels like me. (And I've probably missed a group or two.) I can't imagine something like this incident happening here. (Of course, with public schools, anything's possible, but still. . . .)

So what's the lesson here? Eclectablog has one answer:

They terrorized a bright young man for being clever and creative and industrious, showing him that having an Arab-sounding name and brown skin means you are a suspect just because of who you are. The long-term impacts on him could be devastating.

They showed Ahmed’s classmates that it’s okay to treat people who look different or have foreign-sounding names as less than human, stripping away their dignity, and making them look like criminals simply because of who they are, not because of anything they have actually done.

Finally, as my friend Stephanie White put it on Facebook, they taught Ahmed and his classmates that “bigotry still carries the force of law in our country.”

I should note that the school administration claims that the coverage is biased (as does the mayor, who is not noted for her pro-Muslim sentiments), and the comments at the Dallas News story have a fair measure of comments blaming the "PC left" for the less than positive reaction. Yeah, well: I really try to be reality-based, as much as possible, and I don't think I have much of an ideology (except, maybe, "We're all in this together"). That said, just looking at the reported facts, this was a major eff-up from the git-go on the part of the teacher, the administration and the police.