In the land of the free and the home of the brave, some kid got arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school.
I thought it was a joke when I first heard it. Some spoof out of a satirical site like "The Onion" had been taken seriously, I thought. Then there it was in black and white in the Dallas Morning News:
"Irving's (Texas) police chief announced Wednesday that charges won't be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a 'hoax bomb' on campus.
"At a joint press conference with Irving ISD (Independent School District), Chief Larry Boyd said the device -- confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen's insistence that it was a clock -- was 'certainly suspicious in nature.'
"School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed 'for his safety and for the safety of the officers' and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.
"'The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there's no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,'" Boyd said, describing the incident as a 'naive accident.'"
I'm firmly in the camp of believing this wouldn't have happened to a freckled, red-headed lad named Carter or Jones. The issue of prejudice is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so. But there's another serious issue here: cowardice.
Somewhere, some real terrorist is reading accounts of this farce and thinking, "Just wait until they get a look at me." He and his friends are laughing at the weak, degenerate Americans so riddled with fear they're scared when a follower of the Prophet shows up at school with a free-lance science project.
Don't judge the courage of a nation -- or the lack of it -- by the worst day of a panicky teacher in Texas. I get that. And yes, there have been terrible thing happen at schools. Some of them might have been prevented if people had been more vigilant. No argument there. Unfortunately for that paranoid rationale, however, no school massacre I know of was committed by a 14-year-old walking into class carrying a bomb who showed the device to his engineering teacher first. And no bomb I ever heard of was also an alarm clock. The trouble started when the thing beeped during English class.
If this incident had ended with the panic attack of an English teacher, we would have all chuckled at this if we'd ever even heard of it. It's the handcuffing and the arrest that's humiliating. How could reasonable adults have escalated this -- quoting the police chief here -- "naive accident' so ridiculously?
Yeah, if the clock had blown up and killed somebody we'd all be sorry. But read the Dallas Morning News article quoting the police. They figured out the gadget contained no explosive but hauled the kid off anyway, figuring that the kid was trying to scare people.
People in Irving are scared a lot, it seems. Consider this Feb. 6, 2015, Facebook post by Mayor Beth Van Duyne, to cite just one example: "Sharia Law Court was NOT approved or enacted by the City of Irving. Recently, there have been rumors suggesting that the City of Irving has somehow condoned, approved or enacted the implementation of a Sharia Law Court in our City. Let me be clear, neither the City of Irving, our elected officials or city staff have anything to do with the decision of the mosque that has been identified as starting a Sharia Court."
The Austin American-Statesman checked this out. A local mosque had set up a non-binding counseling and arbitration service -- something that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if a Christian congregation had done it.
Back in the high school case, the principal and five police officers made the decision to take this kid into custody, leading him out of the school in handcuffs "for his safety and for the safety of the officers." That's incredible.
We can argue if prejudice was at work here because none of us know for sure what's in the hearts of others. But a half-dozen of the biggest bigots in America would never have made such a dumb mistake if any of them had also possessed a bit of bravery.
Commentary on 09/19/2015