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Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Ahmed Mohamed stands with his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, at a news conference on September 16, 2015 in Irving, Texas. AFP PHOTO | BEN TORRES | GETTY IMAGES
In Summary
- Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News he hoped to impress teachers by bringing the clock to school on Monday.
- Irving police chief Larry Boyd insisted that Mohamed's ethnicity had nothing to do with the response.
President Barack Obama
congratulated Ahmed Mohamed, 14, on his skills in a pointed rebuke to
school and police officials — who defended his arrest — amid accusations
of Islamophobia.
"Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it
to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like
science. It's what makes America great," Obama tweeted.
Mohamed
is the son of Sudanese immigrants. His father, Mohamed ElHassan
Mohamed, is a politician who contested against Sudan President Omar Al
Bashir in the country’s last elections.
A photo of
Mohamed standing in handcuffs while wearing a T-shirt with the US space
agency NASA's logo was retweeted thousands of times in a matter of hours
and "#IStandWithAhmed" became the top trending hashtag on Twitter.
Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News he hoped to impress teachers by bringing the clock to school on Monday.
HOBBY
"My hobby is to invent stuff," the teen said in a video posted on the paper's website, filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom.
"I
made a clock. It was really easy. I wanted to show something small at
first... they took it wrong so I was arrested for a hoax bomb."
The
son of Sudanese immigrants who live in a Dallas suburb, Mohamed loved
the 120robotics club in middle school and was hoping to find something
similar at MacArthur High School. He did not get the reaction he hoped
for when he showed the clock to his engineering teacher.
"He was like, 'That's really nice,'" Mohamed said. "'I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'"
When
the clock's alarm went off in another class, the teacher told him it
looked like a bomb and confiscated it. The school called police and
Mohamed was taken away in cuffs amid suspicion he intended to frighten
people with the device.
Police said Wednesday they had determined that Mohamed had no malicious intent and it was "just a naive set of circumstances".
Irving police chief Larry Boyd insisted that Mohamed's ethnicity had nothing to do with the response.
"Our reaction would have been the same either way. That's a very suspicious device," Boyd told reporters.
"We live in an age where you can't take things like that to school."
A
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".
A
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.
"My son is a very brilliant boy," said Mr Mohamed.
'BRING YOUR CLOCK'
White
House spokesman Josh Earnest called the incident an opportunity to
"search our own conscious for biases that might be there".
"At least some of Ahmed's teachers failed him," he said, adding that "this has the potential to be a teachable moment".
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.
"Clearly we believe it's the
result of the rising level of anti-Muslim sentiment in our society,"
CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told AFP.
"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."
Wired
magazine was among those who responded to the incident with a mixture
of humour and horror, posting an article entitled "How to Make Your Own
Homemade Clock That Isn't a Bomb."
FACEBOOK
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Mohamed to "keep building," saying: "I'd love to meet you."
Along
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. "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.
Canadian
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.
Mohamed's family launched a Twitter account to thank his supporters using @IStandWithAhmed as his handle.
"Thank
you fellow supporters. 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.
The hashtag
#IStandWithAhmed had been tweeted more than 800,000 times by Wednesday
afternoon, according to analytics site Topsy.com.
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