Ahmed was arrested Monday after a teacher thought a homemade clock he built was a bomb. The hashtag #IStandWithAhmed had been tweeted more than 800,000 times by Wednesday afternoon, according to analytics site Mohamed, 14, left, and his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, thank supporters during a news conference at their home, Wednesday, Sept. 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. Mohamed's family launched a Twitter account to thank his supporters using as his handle.
#Nice clock bring it by the white house free
"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.Ĭanadian 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. 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."įacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Mohamed to "keep building," saying: "I'd love to meet you."Īlong 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. "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." "Clearly we believe it's the result of the rising level of anti-Muslim sentiment in our society," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told AFP. 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.
"At least some of Ahmed's teachers failed him," he said, adding that "this has the potential to be a teachable moment." White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the incident an opportunity to "search our own conscious for biases that might be there." "My son is a very brilliant boy," Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed - who has run for president in Sudan - told CNN. "We live in an age where you can't take things like that to school."Ī 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."Ī 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. That's a very suspicious device," Boyd told reporters. "Our reaction would have been the same either way. Irving police chief Larry Boyd insisted that Mohamed's ethnicity had nothing to do with the response. Police said Wednesday they have determined that Mohamed had no malicious intent and it was "just a naive set of circumstances." The school called police and Mohamed was taken away in cuffs amid suspicion he intended to frighten people with the device. When the clock's alarm went off in another class, the teacher told him it looked like a bomb and confiscated it. "'I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'" "He was like, 'That's really nice,'" Mohamed said. He did not get the reaction he hoped for when he showed the clock to his engineering teacher. 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. they took it wrong so I was arrested for a hoax bomb." I wanted to show something small at first. "My hobby is to invent stuff," the teen said in a video posted on the paper's website, filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom. Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News he hoped to impress teachers by bringing the clock to school on Monday.
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