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| Ahmed's Clock |
Donald Rumsfeld, Former Secretary of Defense once said in his Rumsfeld's Rules that to have a strong opinion on something, you have to know either everything about it or nothing about it.
By now everyone has heard about that 9th grade student named Ahmed Mohamed, who brought a clock to school that looked for all the world like a bomb from the Canadian show Flashpoint. Ahmed was arrested, and then the president invited the kid to the White House. Richard Dawkins criticized Ahmed, the CEO of Facebook offered him a job, and liberal comedian Bill Maher said that the clock did look like a bomb, and the school did the right thing.
On Twitter and Facebook the hash tag #IStandwithAhmed has been trending, and Microsoft Corporation sent Ahmed loads of free stuff, while several FOX anchors criticized Ahmed for bringing the clock in the first place, and billionaire Marc Cuban, who is reportedly considering a run for elected office said that Ahmed's sister, who claims she was suspended by the same school in the past, has been giving him many of the answers. Ahmed has since been pulled from the school, and is now being homeschooled by his parents, to the approval of FOX's Greg Gutfeld
The entire nation has an opinion, including the president, about this kid. But we need to slow down. Firstly, we do not know the entire story, the police are not done with their investigation. Secondly, Maher is right that is Muslims had not been blowing things up around the world for the past thirty years this would not have happened.
It is unfortunate that Ahmed was arrested for his clock, but the outrage in this incident was misplaced. It should not lie with the Police Officers and Teachers, whose job it is to protect the other children at the school. The outrage should lie with the uncivilized, godless barbarians who had been blowing things up all over the world for so long that we now actually need to be concerned when a kid brings a weird looking clock to school.
There may have been wrongdoing on both sides here. The investigation is not done, and, to be safe, unlike the president, we should not rush to assume that the hard working Texas Police did wrong here until we have actual evidence to that affect. Perhaps the boy should not have been arrested, but perhaps he also should have had enough sense not to bring something that looks like it could easily be attached to explosives and blow the school sky high for show and tell.
However, setting aside Ahmed for the moment, we should look back at the debate that has been going on, with the controversial and unstable Jorge Ramos saying that this was the result of Islamaphobia. Of course no on wants to be Islamaphobic, but we also do not want to have a phobia of being Islamaphobic. This could easily result in the next time something like this happens, nobody does anything because it just might be their "white privilege" talking. And it turns out to be a bomb, and everybody dies.
I don't stand with Ahmed, because, like you, like Jorge Ramos, and like the president, I don't know Ahmed, and I don't know enough about him to say I support him. But I do stand with the police. And it is better to have to apologize to one kid's parents because he spent a couple of hours in handcuffs, than to have to explain to 500 kids' parents why a guy who had something that looked like a bomb wasn't stopped, and all their kids are now in body bags.
Andrew C. Abbott
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