Islamaphobia rears its ugly racist religioust head again.

[Peter Lemkin]

Schools in Irving, Texas, Feared Islam Well Before They Thought Ahmed Mohamed's Clock Was a Bomb

By Jessica Huseman

14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed is greeted by a supporter during a news conference on Sept. 16, 2015, in Irving, Texas.

Photo by Ben Torres/Getty Images

On Monday, Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old who lives in Irving, Texas, was arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school. To teachers, administrators, and police, Ahmed looked like a potential bomb-maker. To the rest of the world, he looked like a confused kid wearing handcuffs and a NASA T-shirt. It would be reassuring to attribute the incident to the ignorance of one teacher spiraling out of control, an isolated incident bearing no greater import. Unfortunately, this wasn't the Irving Independent School District's first bout with Islamophobia.

In 2012, the Irving School Board, which oversees just under 35,000 students in the Dallas suburb, got itself into a tizzy after a chain email was sent to board members warning, "Christians are going to have to stand up against the pro Islamic teaching in our public schools with CSCOPE curriculum" CSCOPE is a state-produced tool most teachers in Texas use to plan their lessons.

Instead of hitting delete like most human beings who receive chain emails, the board hired someone to conduct a full report on the matter. Not just any someone, but a good "socially and fiscally conservative" former social studies teacher who "watches Glenn Beck on a regular basis," said Jan Moberly, the director of the organization that administers CSCOPE. If anyone was going to snoop out that pro-Muslim rhetoric, it was going to be her.

But did she find anything? No. After reading through every single textbook and producing a 72-page reportwhich the district paid her to writethe former teacher found in Irving's textbooks a bias toward Christianity (which was mentioned twice as much as any other religion) and away from radical Islam. Whew.

And why should she have found anything? After all, a 2010 resolution from the Texas State Board of Education already took care of unwanted Islamic influence in public-school textbooks.

But Irving's fight against Islamic creep didn't end there. Earlier this year its city council voted to back a proposed law that rejected foreign influence on the courts. Why? Because they found out a local Islamic tribunal mediated civil cases on a voluntary basis for members of the local Muslim community. Something, I'll point out, that Jewish and Christian organizations also do. Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne has since become a conservative darling for backing the law even after the Muslim community called it out for what it was: fearmongering.

It's no surprise, then, that Van Duyne's first Facebook post after Ahmed's arrest thanked police for keeping children safe while also touting Irving ISD's laudable STEM programs. She later edited the post to include the concern that, if this had been her child, she would have been pretty upset. Good for her for rethinking, but it shouldn't have come to that.

While it's impossible to say for sure whether Ahmed would have been arrested if his last name weren't "Mohamed," I think we can all offer a pretty educated guess. The obvious absurdity that a school with award-winning STEM programs can't tell the difference between a bomb and a clock is almost too upsetting to think about. As is the fact that police transported a 14-year-old boy in handcuffs to a juvenile detention center because he couldn't provide an explanation for the clock other than that he wanted to impress his teachers with his obviously impressive skills.

Schools are supposed to foster creativity. Teachers should be pushing students to their limits and praising academic behavior that goes above and beyond. Ahmed, whoonce built a Bluetooth speaker for a friend as a gift, has obvious talent. Instead of praising that potential, the school threw him in handcuffs and told him he was a danger to other students.

Top Comment
Every one of the people responible for the mistreatment of this child should be fired immediately. Of course, that won't happen. More evidence of what a terrible, backward place Texas is. (I've lived there.) More...

-Mike Schr

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And when they realized their mistake, they still suspended him for three days and sent an absurd letter to parents asking them to review the Student Code of Conduct with their children. That code of conduct prohibits students from bringing "a look-alike' weapon" with them to schoola provision Ahmed would have assumed he was following, because a clock doesn't look like a bomb. The school's administration has now made a fool of itself on a national scale. Serves them right.

[Tracy Riddle]

[Drew Phipps]

I got a shirt just like that one.

[Peter Lemkin]

Arrest of 14-Year-Old Student for Making a Clock: the Fruits of Sustained Fearmongering and Anti-Muslim Animus

Glenn Greenwald
Sep. 16 2015, 3:13 p.m.






There are sprawling industries and self-proclaimed career "terrorism experts" in the U.S. that profit greatly by deliberately exaggerating the threat of Terrorism and keeping Americans in a state of abject fear of "radical Islam." There are all sorts of polemicists who build their public platforms by demonizing Muslims and scoffing at concerns over "Islamaphobia," with the most toxic ones insisting that such a thing does not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country, or even as they are physically attacked.
The U.S. government just formally renewed the "State of Emergency" it declared in the aftermath of 9/11 for the 14th time since that attack occurred, ensuring that the country remains in a state of permanent, endless war, subjected to powers that are still classified as "extraordinary" even though they have become entirely normalized. As a result of all of this, a minority group of close to 3 million people is routinely targeted with bigotry and legal persecution in the Home of the Free, while fear and hysteria reign supreme in the Land of the Brave.
What happened in Irving, Texas, yesterday to a 14-year-old Muslim high school freshman is far from the worst instance, but it is highly illustrative of the rotted fruit of this sustained climate of cultivated fear and demonization. The Dallas Morning News reports that "Ahmed Mohamed who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High," but "instead, the school phoned police."
Despite insisting that he made the clock to impress his engineering teacher, consistent with his long-time interest in "inventing stuff," Ahmed was arrested by the police and led out of school with his hands cuffed behind him. When he was brought into the room to be questioned by the four police officers who had been dispatched to the school, one of them who had never previously seen him said: "Yup. That's who I thought it was." As a result, he "felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name one of the most common in the Muslim religion."
On Twitter, Anil Dash published a photo, provided by the boy's family, taken as he was led out in cuffs. Note that he's wearing a NASA shirt:
Photo: Anil Dash/Twitter

There's absolutely no evidence that this was anything more than a clock, nor any indication of any kind that the talented and inventive freshman built it as anything other than a school project. But even now, "police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it's a clock." According to the BBC, "police spokesman James McLellan said that, throughout the interview, Ahmed had maintained that he built only a clock, but said the boy was unable to give a broader explanation' as to what it would be used for."
The Dallas Morning News let Ahmed speak for himself by posting a video of him recounting what happened. Behold the Terrorist Mastermind:

The behavior here is nothing short of demented. And it's easy to mock, which in turn has the effect of belittling it and casting it as some sort of bizarre aberration. But it's not that. It's the opposite of aberrational. It's the natural, inevitable byproduct of the culture of fear and demonization that has festered and been continuously inflamed for many years. The circumstances that led to this are systemic and cultural, not aberrational.
The mayor of Irving, Beth Van Duyne, became a beloved national hero to America's anti-Muslim fanatics when, last February, she seized on a fraudulent online chain letter, which claimed that area imams had created a special court based on sharia law. In response, Mayor Van Duyne posted a Facebook rant in which she vowed to "fight with every fiber of my being" the nonexistent "sharia court." One anti-Muslim website gushed that Irving "is being called ground zero' in the battle to prevent Islamic law from gaining a foothold, no matter how small, in the U.S. legal system" and hailed her as "the mayor who stood up to the Muslim Brotherhood."
That led to support for a bill introduced in the Texas State Legislature banning the use of foreign law, which its sponsor made clear was targeted at least in part at these "sharia courts." The Irving City Council went out of its way to enact a resolution supporting the state bill. It was enacted in June. One of the City Council members who opposed the bill William "Bill" Mahone, who "denounced the vote and urged Irving to 'embrace the Muslims'" then lost his seat in the city election "by a wide margin." I've spoken to Muslim groups in Irving and there is a small but thriving community there, which in turn has produced intense anti-Muslim animus.
People participate in a rally against a proposed mosque and Islamic community center near ground zero in New York, Aug. 22, 2010.
Photo: Seth Wenig/AP

Just like Ahmed's arrest, Irving is representative of the U.S. broadly, not aberrational. The U.S. just a few years ago went into a shameful fit of mass hysteria over a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero as though Muslims generally were guilty of that attack but since then, in obscurity, ordinary mosques have faced all sorts of opposition from their mere existence, or once they do exist, physical menacing and violence. A 2014 Pew Poll found that Americans feel more negatively toward Muslims than any other religious group in the country.There are all sorts of obvious, extreme harms that come from being a nation at permanent war. Your country ends up killing huge numbers of innocent people all over the world. Vast resources are drained away from individuals and programs of social good into the pockets of weapons manufacturers. Core freedoms are inexorably and inevitably eroded seized in its name. The groups being targeted are marginalized and demonized in order to maximize fear levels and tolerance for violence.
But perhaps the worst of all harms is how endless war degrades the culture and populace of the country that perpetrates it. You can't have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries bombing seven of them in the last six years alone and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school. That's no more surprising than watching carrots sprout after you plant carrot seeds in fertile ground and then carefully water them. It's natural and inevitable, not surprising or at all difficult to understand.

[David Guyatt]

Let me put the foregoing in context:

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

Followed by:

"Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

And, of course:

To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Extracts from Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Strategy.

If we remember that Brzezinski was chosen as an advisor by Obama in hist first presidential campaign, and if we are a little confused between what Obama appears to stand for and what he does, and why the neocons still hold sway in Washington, then my money is on the influence of Brzezinski on Obama's foreign policy.

The foregoing quotes clearly show, in my opinion, that Brzezinski is clearly the grandfather of NPAC's A New American Century. This conclusion also suggests that Obama is a closet neocon.

[Magda Hassan]

While Obama drones and bombs Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East he invites one bright Muslim boy to the White House. No one will notice the drones now.

[Peter Lemkin]

While Obama drones and bombs Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East he invites one bright Muslim boy to the White House. No one will notice the drones now.

For mental midgets like Trump, this will PROVE that they are both Muslim terrorists. If Trump becomes President [which I doubt...the American People are stupid, in large part....but NOT THAT stupid!],I'll burn my passport....as the USA would not even survive more than a few months. Nuclear conflagration would surely soon follow, while the country descended internally into a Nazi style Police State.

[Magda Hassan]

If Trump becomes President [which I doubt...the American People are stupid, in large part....but NOT THAT stupid!],......

Don't underestimate the stupidity of large number of white people. Especially fearful marginalised old WASP males.

[Peter Lemkin]

If Trump becomes President [which I doubt...the American People are stupid, in large part....but NOT THAT stupid!],......

Don't underestimate the stupidity of large number of white people. Especially fearful marginalised old WASP males.

I don't underestimate their stupidity and lack of information of the World - even of their own situation; but they are now a minority in the USA and growing smaller by the hour. The sum total of all the groups he and people like him/them hate are now a majority...if they only will come out and vote.

[Dawn Meredith]

And this boy was held and questioned by four cops who did not permit him to have a parent present. The chief of police was on tv saying he had no such right. Guess this very long held right set out in the TX. Family Code is only observed if your skin is not brown. Oh yes, under NDAA we have no rights. Geez, now it makes sense.

Dawn