Dear hippie friends lauding this story on Facebook: You are being played and you should have known better…
14 years after the terrorist mass murders of 9/11 by radical Muslim extremists and the hippie American Left has been desperately searching for anti-Muslim retaliation or violence or bigotry and come up with failure and empty hands.
Despite Islamists using bombs and other weapons to murder civilian targets across the world, the tolerance and objectivism inherent in American traditionalism just kept failing to make any false deductions between a peaceful Muslim and an Islamist. Then in 2015, a kid brings a bomb-looking thing to his school and the cops are called and we are supposed to make some kind of “see?? Don’t go thinking all muslims are bomb using terrorists!” conclusion just because the kids name is Ahmed Muhammed? Since when is it okay to accuse people of oppressive race or ethnic bias without any evidence other than your own confirmation bias? Or more importantly – What about the part where the item he had, literally, objectively, unequivocally looks like a bomb you dummies?
I used to like debunking these but the joy is gone from the process. It’s just annoying at this point that people actually fall victim to such obvious logical errors just because of emotion based confirmation bias.
Nothing wrong happened in this story except what the kid did: He should have known better than to bring a suspicious looking thing like that to school. Okay, big deal, who cares? He wasn’t expelled from school for it (though creating bomb scares is usually an offense academia punishes), he wasn’t beaten or abused by any students or authority figures for it, he wasn’t even arrested as is often falsely reported (he was detained by police while they investigated) – yet this story is all over social media as some kind of example vindicating hippie victimhood mentality.
Everything about this message is wrong.
Acting as if some major oppressive weight was reigned upon this kid, Hippies are overcompensating as always by making him out to be a hero. That’s bananas. He didn’t do anything wrong except make a dumb decision so he shouldn’t be penalized but the kid does not deserve praise because he didn’t do anything special, either. People posting this story are trying to make the guy out to be a wiz kid genius unable to flourish in the field of science because of the oppressive stigma of his name and what thousands of people do in the name of his religion.
Idk what the kids grades, science fair history, or invention portfolio looks like but color me “not impressed” by this “clock” (which looks to me like just an assembly from a kit of some kind). Instead of being praised he should have been told that what he did was not smart. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t bring knowingly suspicious looking wired electronics to school unless it’s part of a project and when police question you in lawful and reasonable suspicion of a crime, you can’t be illusive with your responses and expect a good outcome.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s not even science. It’s common sense.
PS: the answer to the above image is below. This is the “clock” in question:
UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, everything I said was right and more. Much much more. In fact, this whole thing now appears to be a complete hoax, intentionally devised to illicit exactly the kind of knee-jerk hippie confirmation bias that it succeeded in stirring among the dummies I called out. Some major additions to the story:
1- While the public was lead to believe that Ahmed was some kind of science enthusiast wiz-kid building robots on his own only to be unfairly oppressed, he evidently just popped open the casing of a cheap nightstand style digital clock and put the guts of it in a supplies case (explained here and re-created below):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bnhqqVDdF4
2- Ahmed admitted that he knew the device looked suspiciously dangerous:
“I closed it with a cable, so… because, I didn’t want to lock it to make it seem like a threat so I just used simple cable…. so it won’t look that much suspicious”.
This was obviously a screw-up that gave away his intent because to a 14 year old it sounds like a good defense to argue that you were trying to do exactly the opposite of what you’re being accused of, when in reality, no one actually thinks that a closed pencil case looks like a “suspicious threat”, adding a cable to the case makes it look more-not-less suspicious, and of course leaving it unlocked for people to discover unlabeled electronic wiring inside said suspicious looking cabled case is not at all the assistance to tamping down threatening appearance like he claimed. Kindov destroys the whole “racism” argument that the bomb connection was only made because of his name and religious/ethnic background when the kid himself agreed with the premise of how the device appears.
3- No one freaked out about the watch until started beeping in class, leading to the discovery of the wired contraption Ahmed admitted looked like a suspicious threat. Even though the teacher he showed the clock to instructed him to keep it under wraps for exactly the reason of it’s threatening appearance, Ahmed admitted to plugging the clock in the classroom (presumably so the timer would go off), which lead to the whole bomb investigation.
4- Turns out that his family has a history of this kind of victim-attention-grabbing stunt-doing and they used their kid. Ahmeds dadMohamed Elhassan Mohamed ran for President of Sudan (run by a dictatorship so i’m not sure what that’s all about) twice and participated in a media stunt against the Koran by serving as it’s public defender on trial for it to be burned.
So what did we learn? Repeat after me, class: “Never believe dumb-hippie talking point memes without further investigation or use of basic common sense”.