He Didn't Build a Clock, Cont'd

Ahmed Mohamed visits the White House https://t.co/0wngvjc8EQ pic.twitter.com/bwAnyNM2Ns

— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) October 19, 2015

The kid didn’t “make” anything; he just pulled an old clock apart and put the remains in a box and brought it to school.

Well, yes, the clock that made Ahmed famous wasn’t much of an invention. The blogger you linked, Ian Tuttle, isn’t exactly much of an investigator, because Ahmed himself said the same thing: “He told Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show that it took him ‘10 or 20 minutes’ to put it together and that he has built more complicated items, but that the clock was simple, using some parts that were scrapped off so that it was easier.” [CB note: that Nightly Show appearance occurred after Tuttle’s post.]

The clock is the thing that made Ahmed famous, but the reason people are calling him an inventor is because he was:

Ralph Kubiak, Mohamed’s seventh-grade history teacher, said that Mohamed was known as an electronics enthusiast with a history of being disciplined for using a handmade remote control to cause a classroom projector to malfunction on command. Mohamed was also noted for making a battery charger to help recharge the cellphone of a school tutor. According to The Guardian, everybody in middle school knew Mohamed as “the kid who makes crazy contraptions,” and who fixed electronics classmates brought to him, earning him the nickname “Inventor Kid.”

(I’m quoting Wikipedia heavily here, but it’s all well-cited.)

But let’s turn to Tuttle’s concerns—that “the details above suggest legitimate questions,” which “in a saner political culture, would have preceded the creation and propagation of the narrative.” What, exactly, are those “legitimate questions”? Should we be speculating that Ahmed was trying to create a bomb scare (by making a clock and telling everyone that it was a clock?), or that he was part of a sinister scheme to ‘fake’ a nationwide scandal? To me, it looks like nothing but dogwhistling.

Ahmed’s family’s choice to go to Quatar, where, incidentally he will be under much less scrutiny, as a student, as well as a political victim, has come as a betrayal to his supporters in the U.S. They have gone out on a limb defending him despite what must be real concerns about the narrative, saying there is a place for bright Muslim kids in our U.S., only to have him reject that and opt for Qatar—hardly a bastion of enlightenment and morality, or education, in the world.

He, or his family, has now said, basically, “I will not be your figurehead in this fight within American culture; I am stepping outside American culture. I have taken your support, but I am rejecting your system.”

And this is one of the reasons for the frustration many are feeling.