Stop the Madness!
Stop the madness. Just stop. 13-year old Ahmed Mohamed built a clock, brought it to school,
had it mistaken for a bomb, and got arrested. Quie the media madness.
Immediately everyone with an opinion (and that's everyone) blurted out their disgust, asserting that this incident was an act of blatant racism. He was arrested becuase "he is Muslim" screamed the liberal media and twitter idiots everywhere.
Ahmed deserves an apology because he was right and they were wrong, but this incident is only the latest example of the media's complete overreaction and immediate condemnation of a situation that could use a whole lot of perspective.
To do this, lets examine the facts:
Ahmed brought a self made clock to school that looked like this
When he showed it to his engineering teacher, he said to Ahmed
"I advise you not to show any other teachers" (Dallas News). Was the
teacher being mean or did he simply recognize that Ahmed's clock
could easily be mistaken for something else, like a bomb?
The device, which we now know was a clock, kept beeping in his
backpack during class (Dallas News). The teacher asked to see the clock.
He told her it was a clock. She wasn't sure. She reported it the principal
and the rest is history.
Kyle Smith in The New York Post brilliantly addressed the media's
tendency to overreact in an article titled "How Ahmed's Clock Became a False, Convenient Tale of Racism." He cites incidents where white kids have been kicked out of school or arrested for even more trivial matters, like when a 16-year old wrote a short story in which he imagined using a gun to kill a dinosaur and as a result was arrested, handcuffed, and charged with disorderly conduct. As evidenced by the examples in this article, muslim boys are not the ones subject to "overenthusiastic use of school discipline and police force" yet we never hear about these stories and certainly none of them were invited to the White House.
In this way Ahmed and his clock became a vehicle for the left
and the media as a whole to overreacte and immediately condemn
a situation as "racist," when much more plausible explanations
were available.
On his show Real Time, Bill Maher reiterates many of my points
while also adding some of his own. On the panel speaking with him
is also outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban, who was able to speak with
Ahmed over the phone, Chris Matthews, former Gov. George Pataki,
and Jorge Ramos.
Hopefully sanity can prevail in an a age where overreations and
jumping to conclusions seem to dominate the media.
