America Backs Wrongly-Accused Teen Ahmed Mohamed With #IStandwithAhmed

Monique

9 years ago

Today has been a horrible day for America, and incredibly enough, it’s also been a redeeming day for America. In a fast show of force, what seems like the majority of America have joined forces to show that we Stand with Ahmed Mohamed.

Ahmed, a 14-year-old high school student in Irving, TX, came to school with his engineering project, a working clock. When he showed it to his engineering teacher (who has yet to say anything about her involvement in the story), her reaction to the invention and later actions taken lead to the police arresting Ahmed. You can read about it here, since the story’s really heartbreaking and I don’t feel like recounting every moment of it, especially since the Dallas Morning News does a great job at giving the details and follow-ups. But some extremely heartbreaking parts that stood out to me were these:

“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” [police spokesman James McLellan] said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:”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?”

“They thought, ‘How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a treat?” Ahmed said.

“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.

“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem, who directs the council’s North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed’s arrest. “We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”

This ill-advised letter from Ahmed’s school also didn’t help matters, to say the least:

Here’s the victim-blaming letter Ahmed Mohammed’s school sent to justify his arrest http://t.co/o3H2WMRppI via @voxdotcom | Unreal

— Jeff (@JeffJSays) September 16, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOne of the biggest ironies of the whole tragic event is that when he was arrested, Ahmed was wearing a NASA shirt. It makes the whole thing, including the insane disbelief at a boy simply creating a clock to learn more about electronics and engineering, sad on a profound level. You can wear a NASA shirt, show an interest in something that could help humanity, like engineering, and still be considered a threat simply because of your skin color, your religion, and your name.

Since the event, there has been tons of outrage and, thankfully, a tremendous swell of support from high and low, including President Obama, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Google Science Fair, NASA, Twitter and more, all culled within the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, which is still trending on Twitter. People have also been tweeting pictures of themselves with clocks, showing how horrifying it is that a simple gizmo can be seen as a threat.

#IStandWithAhmed because this isn’t an isolated incident limited to some backward American school district https://t.co/7lHvR2PycX — Glen Coco (@MrPooni) September 16, 2015

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