When Ahmed Mohamed (shown) “made” a clock that looked for all the world like a bomb and took it to school, he was taken out of class and questioned by police. He was thrust into the media spotlight. He was showered with gifts and fame. He was invited to the White House where he met President Obama and given all-expense-paid trips where he met and was applauded by other heads-of-state. He was given a full scholarship to attend a Qatar Foundation school. He tweeted and Instagrammed all of his adventures and is smiling in all of the pictures. All of this adds up to his being a victim and only $15 million will make the pain go away.
As The New American reported when the story of Ahmed and his clock first broke:
By the end of the day Ahmed Mohamed was a celebrity with his name and face all over the Internet. By mid-week he was receiving gifts and internship offers from corporations and a GoFundMe account was set up to with the goal to raise $60,000 for his tuition to MIT. It has already raised almost $8,000. Then, President Obama spoke up. Actually he tweeted. His tweet said, “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.”
There are a few problems with the narrative that Ahmed, his family, and the mainstream media put forward, though. The biggest of these is that even though the 14-year-old claimed to have “invented” and “made” the clock, he didn’t “invent” or “make” anything except a media sensation which appears to have been made to order. As this writer said then:
In an interview with Good Morning America, Ahmed said, “This isn’t my first invention and it won’t be my last invention.” He seems proud of his clock and his scientific ability which made it possible for him to create it….
After all, he did invent a clock out of circuit boards, transistors, resisters, switches, a display and a small briefcase, right?
Except he didn’t.
Several Youtube videos and articles written by electronics experts and enthusiasts compellingly demonstrate that Ahmed didn’t invent anything. He didn’t even build anything. All he did was take a commercially available digital clock from the 1980s, remove the internal parts from the plastic case, add a few wires — which serve no purpose and do make the whole thing look pretty suspicious — and drop it into a large pencil box that looks like a small briefcase.
And contrary to his supposed shock and dismay at being questioned by police, the boy admitted that he knew his clock looked “suspicious.” In a video interview with NBCFW, the Fort Worth, Texas, NBC affiliate, he said, “I closed it with a cable, ’cause I didn’t want to lock it to make it seem like a threat, so I just used a simple cable so it won’t look that much suspicious.”
As we reported then:
He told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that when he was questioned by police, “I felt like I was a terrorist. I felt like all the names I was called.” When asked what he meant by “all the names I was called,” he explained that he had been called a “bombmaker” and a “terrorist” in middle school.
His shame and humiliation are certainly not evident in pictures taken right after that, though. He is seen smiling and waiving the peace sign.
Now, his family — having moved to Qatar where Ahmed is attending school on a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation — is saying that the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of “Islamaphobic” school officials and police officers was compounded by “an orchestrated [media] campaign against a 14-year-old boy.” For that pain and suffering, they are demanding $15 million from the city and school district. The family’s lawyer has sent letters to both the city of Irving, Texas, and the Irving Independent School District giving them 60 days to pay up or be sued.
The claim of “an orchestrated [media] campaign against a 14-year-old boy” is ridiculous on its face. As Breitbart reported:
Which campaign was that? From the get-go, news organizations like CNN blasted out Muslim teen Ahmed Mohamed creates clock, shows teachers, gets arrested. They threw him a failed fundraiser. TIME named him one of 2015’s top 30 most influential teens. The local Dallas newspaper characterized Ahmed as the severely traumatized yet “self-assured kid with thick framed glasses” with “a talent for tinkering,” a victim of racism and bigotry. Mainstream media gleefully portrayed Ahmed’s meetings with Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Sudan’s Islamic genocidal leader Bashir. They celebrated the teen’s Saudi government funded Mecca pilgrimage and delighted in his tour of Education City, a gift from the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Qatar Foundation, and his White House Astronomy night visit.
Furthermore, “The Mohameds never signed the school district’s privacy release form that would allow officials, otherwise silenced by federal student privacy law protections, to tell their side of the story,” according to Breitbart. So it would have been a little difficult for them to have “orchestrated [a media] campaign against a 14-year-old boy.”
None of these facts prevented the family’s lawyer, Kelly Hollingsworth (who works for the personal injury law firm, Laney and Bollinger), from claiming, “You can find other cases where there is a wrongful arrest or detention and when there are mistakes made by school officials. What you can’t find is the second phase, which is when they went out into the media and had an orchestrated campaign against a 14-year-old boy.”
In truth, it was the Mohamed family that “went out into the media and had an orchestrated campaign.” That campaign appears to have been orchestrated by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed. This is not his first media rodeo. The elder Mohamed is well acquainted with the media. As The New American previously reported:
Ahmed’s father is Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, an Islamic activist who has twice run for president of Sudan; his platform included a pledge that within 100 days he would negotiate to have the United States lift the sanctions which were imposed over 20 years ago because of Sudan’s sponsorship of terrorism.
It is no surprise then, that Mohamed played up to the media to gain favorable coverage. As Yahoo reported, the family held a press conference on their front lawn, “serving up pizza and beverages to the horde of reporters who flocked to their lawn.”
For his part, Ahmed seems to have enjoyed the media attention his lawyer says caused him so much humiliation. Yahoo also reported that Ahmed’s sister helped him set up a Twitter account — @IStandWithAhmed. Odd that such a tech-savvy kid would need help with something as simple as setting up a social media account. That account now has 114,000 followers. He has capitalized on the “brand,” using IStandWithAhmed as his e-mail address and other social media handles. As The New American’s Selwyn Duke wrote:
While Mohamed qualified his race-card comment by saying “I’m really not into politics. I’m into science,” he certainly has played politics better than he has pursued science. [A former teacher] said that he called Mohamed after the Sept. 14 incident, and the boy bragged, “I told you one day I’m going to be — and you told me yourself — I’m going to be really big on the Internet one day.”
It looks like after creating both the pretext for the media frenzy and the media frenzy itself, the family is now using both in an attempt to cash in. If successful, Ahmed’s family would certainly be able to finance more of the elder Mohamed’s activism. Or maybe Ahmed will use it to finance future “inventions.”
Photo of Ahmed Mohamed: AP Images
