Ahmed Mohamed: 'Clock boy' seeks $15m from city and school

[Jason]

The clock isn't the issue, really. If an average non-Muslim US geeky child took the same pet-project to their science teacher do you think the police would be called, the kid would be taken away in handcuffs, that they would be interrogated without their parents or a lawyer present, excluded from school? If they were would that child's parents not have every right to seek recompense from the courts, especially if that child was subsequently vilified by politicians and commentators across national international media as a terrorist, was bullied at school, received death threats, and had people all over the internet suggesting they be locked away or anthraxed or whatever, particularly when such horrendous baying is justified entirely on the basis of the presumed ill-intent of a child?

OK, so the family have moved to Qatar so the lad can complete his education in relative peace in a place where his status as a member of a Muslim family is a complete non-issue. And yet even this is being held up as further evidence of the child's ill-intent. Seems to me this has got far more to do with paranoia, cultural hatred, and people feeling entitled not only to fling shit at a schoolboy but to threaten him as well, while citing that his inability to cope with this somehow justifies that treatment in the first place. This is exactly how abusers justify their abuse isn't it?

It only takes one rogue clock-boy to get through to the white house and where then is your liberal naive approach to a clock-device? It seems you are erring on the side of the Muslim kid despite all the continuous evidence we have of kids indoctrinated in the hate religion of Islam being easily brainwashed and manipulated into suicide bomb attacks.

That my friend is an excellent justification for treating all Muslims as terrorists in waiting. So what should we do about this? Round them up into camps perhaps?

No, define Islam as a Hate Religion here in the West and go from there...make it really easy to leave, new identities for those under threat etc, and provide massive inconvenience to those who remain. A specific tax on Mosques to help pay for the war on ISIS in the Middle East for instance. There's al-sorts you can do which are just short of persecution and prescriptive for the common good. With imagination.

[cronus]

We need a Trump win first, glad you've seen the light Shiva. Bad strain of that opium of the people must be took of the streets, money in this too. In all our interests.

[Jason]

Trump talks big, but I have my reservations - especially regarding his low opinion of the disadvantaged in society -- bordering on complete disregard. I'm not sure how far he's willing to go with his scorched earth policies and I don't particularly trust to his honesty and forthrightness. Paris is just the thing to sway the anger of the people into supporting him. It's much too convenient and I have to wonder where his finances have been and what bills he's running up in his campaign.

Do not summon that which you do not have the power to banish - mangled quote..

[cronus]

Trump talks big, but I have my reservations - especially regarding his low opinion of the disadvantaged in society -- bordering on complete disregard. I'm not sure how far he's willing to go with his scorched earth policies and I don't particularly trust to his honesty and forthrightness. Paris is just the thing to sway the anger of the people into supporting him. It's much too convenient and I have to wonder where his finances have been and what bills he's running up in his campaign.

Do not summon that which you do not have the power to banish - mangled quote..

...lesson of interesting history. No progress without risks though. We won't decide. Figuring what best way forward if he does win...might as well start now. Cos it'll be mega-springtime-producers. Can't help anyone being too good and getting smoked yourself, come the day.

[mistermack]

I really don't see the problem with treating him differently to a white boy. There's nothing wrong with that.
He's not a white boy. He's of arab parenthood.
There is a difference between white people and arab people. Very few white people blow themselves up just to kill people. You can't expect the local police to ignore that, and pretend it doesn't happen. And of course, a lot of those living bombs have been very young. It's a characteristic of suicide bombers. You hardly ever get older ones.

Anyway, the whole thing reeks of deliberate hoax. You can hardly criticise people for taking no chances, when it's a school environment.
Yes, the kid is young. But so are the kids who's lives could have been threatened. People do take school security more seriously than ordinary public security.

[Jason]

Trump talks big, but I have my reservations - especially regarding his low opinion of the disadvantaged in society -- bordering on complete disregard. I'm not sure how far he's willing to go with his scorched earth policies and I don't particularly trust to his honesty and forthrightness. Paris is just the thing to sway the anger of the people into supporting him. It's much too convenient and I have to wonder where his finances have been and what bills he's running up in his campaign.

Do not summon that which you do not have the power to banish - mangled quote..

...lesson of interesting history. No progress without risks though. We won't decide. Figuring what best way forward if he does win...might as well start now. Cos it'll be mega-springtime-producers. Can't help anyone being too good and getting smoked yourself, come the day.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

[cronus]

That's why I intend to fit in on the day. Get me uniform sorted. Those who do nothing, thinking a little old times wit is the ideal escape plan, will be amongst the first to go.

[Jason]

I don't wear my colours on my sleeve.. occupational hazard.

[Seth]

If clock boy gets 15 million, the US has nobody to blame but itself.

If you foster this stupid compensation culture, you have to take the stupid consequences.

Now THAT is something we completely agree on.

Maybe it needs a few dozen clock-boys to succeed, to show how ridiculous the whole thing is.

No, we need to impeach any judge who doesn't immediately dismiss such lawsuits and fine the plaintiffs for filing a frivolous suit and replace them with judges with balls.

Actually, the findings by that engineer about the clock being simply an old clock stuck in a pencil case do a lot to explain why the family has fled to an Arab country.
They know it was a hoax, and they are now shit-scared of being arrested for attempted fraud and attempting to cause a terror alert.
It will be interesting to see how they plan to keep the claim going, without returning in person and risking arrest.

Yup. And all they need is lawyers, they never have to actually appear.

[Seth]

The clock isn't the issue, really. If an average non-Muslim US geeky child took the same pet-project to their science teacher do you think the police would be called, the kid would be taken away in handcuffs, that they would be interrogated without their parents or a lawyer present, excluded from school?

I certainly hope so. They fucking arrest 8 year old kids for bringing a one-inch long GI Joe pistol-shaped piece of plastic. Bringing what very easily could have been an actual bomb (just add Semtex and a blasting cap) to school should get you arrested if for no other reason than to dissuade any other kid from doing the same thing.

If they were would that child's parents not have every right to seek recompense from the courts, especially if that child was subsequently vilified by politicians and commentators across national international media as a terrorist, was bullied at school, received death threats, and had people all over the internet suggesting they be locked away or anthraxed or whatever, particularly when such horrendous baying is justified entirely on the basis of the presumed ill-intent of a child?

That's what you get for being a Muslim and bringing a hoax bomb to school. And it wasn't just his "ill intent," that's involved, it's the fairly obvious ill intent of his dad, who had to know what his son was up to. I'd have grabbed his dad, mom and everybody else in the family and had them interrogated to see if they had any part in the offense. I find it unbelievable that any responsible father would have allowed his son to take such a device to school unless the father was in on the threat. As I said, it looks like either a lawsuit scam or a test run for an actual bomb, and if Dad was too fucking stupid to understand that it's a good thing they all fled the country.

OK, so the family have moved to Qatar so the lad can complete his education in relative peace in a place where his status as a member of a Muslim family is a complete non-issue. And yet even this is being held up as further evidence of the child's ill-intent. Seems to me this has got far more to do with paranoia, cultural hatred, and people feeling entitled not only to fling shit at a schoolboy but to threaten him as well, while citing that his inability to cope with this somehow justifies that treatment in the first place. This is exactly how abusers justify their abuse isn't it?

It's a bit odd, isn't it, that every suicide bomber in the last couple of decades has been a young Muslim male (with the increasingly frequent recent addition of young females) of Middle East extraction, isn't it?

As Ann Coulter says, "At some point it stops being racial profiling and becomes suspect identification."

[Seth]

Attitudes exemplified by yours are driving ordinary Muslims right into the hands of ISIS. Your kind is the best asset of Islamic terrorism.

As long as it drives them out of the United States to a place where we can blow them to Paradise with a Hellfire, that's fine with me. It's the sleepers and moles (like the one occupying the Oval Office) that worry me.

Islam is incompatible with American values, government and law and Muslims should leave and go back to the Middle East where they belong, and stay there. They can live under Sharia law in Saudi Arabia for as many generations as they want, but they damned well cannot be permitted to import it here, ever.

[Brian Peacock]

I really don't see the problem with treating him differently to a white boy. There's nothing wrong with that.
He's not a white boy. He's of arab parenthood.
There is a difference between white people and arab people. Very few white people blow themselves up just to kill people. You can't expect the local police to ignore that, and pretend it doesn't happen. And of course, a lot of those living bombs have been very young. It's a characteristic of suicide bombers. You hardly ever get older ones.

Those in law-enforcement call that profiling. Its the same thing that leads to blacks being stopped and searched more frequently etc.

Anyway, the whole thing reeks of deliberate hoax. You can hardly criticise people for taking no chances, when it's a school environment.
Yes, the kid is young. But so are the kids who's lives could have been threatened. People do take school security more seriously than ordinary public security.

I just wonder why the school was not evacuated then? Surely if there had even been the hint of a genuine threat that's the least that should've happened?

[Seth]

I really don't see the problem with treating him differently to a white boy. There's nothing wrong with that.
He's not a white boy. He's of arab parenthood.
There is a difference between white people and arab people. Very few white people blow themselves up just to kill people. You can't expect the local police to ignore that, and pretend it doesn't happen. And of course, a lot of those living bombs have been very young. It's a characteristic of suicide bombers. You hardly ever get older ones.

Those in law-enforcement call that profiling. Its the same thing that leads to blacks being stopped and searched more frequently etc.

Indeed, because, like middle-eastern Muslims in Muslim communities, Asian communities and Hispanic communities, blacks in those areas where blacks are by far the dominant ethnicity means that of course they are more frequently stopped and searched simply because police encounter them more often than they encounter whites. The fact that blacks are stopped more often than whites on a nationwide basis, which is the bogus statistics liberal twits use to disparage racial profiling as suspect identification, does not mean that blacks are being improperly or unlawfully "profiled" in every, or even most cases any more than it would be profiling if police stop more white people in rural Kansas or Idaho than they do black people simply because there are fewer black people in such places to be stopped.

"Profiling" is a perfectly legitimate law enforcement tactic for solving crimes. Without profiling police will not be able to use the most informative aspect of suspect identification immediately available to them, which is of course the race of a suspect, and this would mean stopping everyone in sight regardless of race or ethnicity in order to avoid a bullshit charge of "racial profiling," which is of course completely idiotic. If the suspect in the crime is identified by witnesses or evidence as being black, or Asian, or Middle-eastern, or Hispanic, there is not only no need to stop anyone not of that ethnicity, and it would be a violation of their civil rights to do so because there would be neither reasonable suspicion nor probable cause to do so.

This bullshit complaint by black activists that disparage "racial profiling" as axiomatically wrong and violative of their civil rights has lead to the ridiculous policies of both police departments and news organizations of refusing to state the race or ethnicity of a suspect in a crime when asking for the public's assistance in apprehending them. This sort of political correctness allows criminals of every ethnicity to escape detection by the public, and that is just pure stupidity.

[mistermack]

Those in law-enforcement call that profiling. Its the same thing that leads to blacks being stopped and searched more frequently etc.

Not a problem. In fact, that's a good thing, as blacks are more likely to commit crimes, and of a more serious nature, and to carry weapons, and to belong to gangs.

Police use profiling to catch criminals, not to annoy people. Males should get stopped and searched more than females. How awfully sexist. But fewer females carry knives or guns or drugs. So you're going to annoy an awful lot of women for nothing, just to give them equal rights.

I just wonder why the school was not evacuated then? Surely if there had even been the hint of a genuine threat that's the least that should've happened?

They probably determined very quickly that it wasn't a bomb, but still needed to find out exactly what he was doing with the timer. I would certainly be very interested, if I was a cop, and would have to be completely satisfied that the intention was harmless, bearing in mind that the kid was an arab.

[mistermack]

It does make me wonder if this kid actually originated this device himself, or just found something that his dad or uncle had been experimenting with, and messed about with it and took it to school.

I'm sure that's what the police would want to know, before they let him go. If it WAS entirely of his own making, what was the original idea, where did he get the materials from, and what was he attempting to do with it?

Until they were entirely sure of every detail, they were fully entitled to treat it as a suspicious project.
And the fact that the family have fled really does make you wonder what's behind it all.