The Clock Faker Goes International
28th September 2015
The story of Ahmed Mohamed is one of the most revealing of our time. Ahmed, a 14-year-old Texas student whose father keeps running for president of Sudan, took apart a clock and stuck the clock’s workings in a case with a lot of wires, dummied up to look like a suitcase bomb. (I assume everyone understands that such bombs use timers, i.e., clocks.) He claimed to have invented or built a clock, when in fact he had merely dismantled and disguised one. Why did he do this? He wanted school authorities to think that he had brought a bomb to school so he could expose their “racism.”
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Which evidently was what Ahmed had in mind. His ploy worked like a charm: the story was big news nationwide, and Barack Obama invited the boy to the White House, while he was also feted by Google, MIT and others. Needless to say, Obama didn’t invite the boy who was suspended from elementary school for biting a pop tart into the shape of a gun to the White House. So this story isn’t about the silliness of zero tolerance school policies, it is about…what, exactly?