Irving 9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school: 'So you tried to make a bomb?'

[Ban Hammer 13,429]

Amazing stuff. His science teacher must have been an idiot.

it was his english teacher that started this fiasco, not his science teacher.

[Boiler 45,731]

I assumed it was a RE project.

[Jacque67 7,328]

it was his english teacher that started this fiasco, not his science teacher.

The English teacher would probably have you arrested as a suspected terrorist for using a lower case "i"!

I assumed it was a RE project.

That figures.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

it was his english teacher that started this fiasco, not his science teacher.

It's not a meaningful distinction. The teacher was an idiot.

[Jacque67 7,328]

Yeah... Circuit boards give me the shits big time!

[decocker 7,198]

teacher was an idiot for not evacuating her students and notifying the school's administration of the immediate threat so they could call in a bomb squad.

[TBoneTX 45,591]

[Moderator hat on]

A post with an inappropriate reference to another member has been removed.

In addition, administrative action has been taken against that participant.

[Darnell 8,478]

meanwhile, back at post #1...

Irving TX is the #1 Muslim community in the USA (population, businesses, owned real-estate, rentals), bypassing Deerborn MI.

Plus there be the head office of the Muslim Relations Council there,

and lots o Mosques.

Why do I know? I am a very former Irving Resident, living in South Irving.... Sure, was cheap real-estate, but so what ? I like to garden, yo...

That high school seems fractured, which bothers me most as I drove by it daily ....

[lostinblue 1,989]

Hey Liberals, #IStandwithAhmed Isn't Only About Racism. It's About School Zero Tolerance Insanity.

Kids of all colors are at risk while paranoia reigns supreme in public schools.

Irving, Texas, ninth-grader Ahmed Muhamed brought a harmless, homemade clock to school to impress his engineering teacher. But he made more of an impression on the police officers who slapped him in handcuffs, hauled him to the station, and accused him of perpetrating a bomb hoax.

As evidenced by Twitter—#IStandWithAhmed—everybody is on Ahmed’s side (with the possible exception of his school’s officials, who sent a letter home to parents alerting them to the non-incident). Even President Obama tweeted, “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.” His message was retweeted 200,000 times in the past three hours.

I stand with Ahmed, too. But I also stand with Alex Stone.

Who is Alex Stone? He’s the South Carolina 16-year-old who was arrested and suspended last year for writing a purely fictional story about a dinosaur in which he killed the prehistoric beast with a gun. Stone was a white kid.

I bring up his race for one reason, and one reason only: Some are suggesting that Ahmed’s race is the only reason he was treated so badly. This is the obvious, inescapable conclusion, according to many left-leaning pundits: school officials identified a kid with an Islamic-sounding name, saw him carting around a device he had built, and cried terrorist!

Mic’s Jon Levine called the incident “anti-Muslim bigotry” and “hypocrisy,” and implied that white kids routinely get away with far worse behavior. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp put it this way:

It's hard to see this as anything but blatant, naked Islamophobia: Police surely would not have hauled off a white kid because of a clock.

This is a popular sentiment on Twitter right now—popular, but dead wrong.

White kids are disciplined—and yes, arrested—for mild misbehavior in schools all the time. It literally happens every day. It happens to white kids. It happens to black kids. It happens to boys and girls, preschoolers and teenagers, athletes and eggheads, wealthy and poor, gay and straight, religious and atheists; it happens all the time, to young people of all stripes.

Note that that I’m not speculating; I’m not suggesting that what happened to Ahmed could have happened to a white kid. I’m asserting that very similar things have happened to white kids—and black, brown, Asian, Indian, and Latino kids—on a routine basis.

Alex Stone is just one example. Here are some others:

• “Little Boy Suspended for Pointing Finger Like a Laser Gun.”
• “School Suspends Kid for Twirling Pencil & Subjects him to 5-HOUR Evaluation!”
• “Kid Twirls a Pencil in Class, N.J. Threatens to Take Him From His Dad and Requires Blood and Urine Testing.” (Pencil-twirling: the hidden dangers of America’s schools, evidently.)
• “Girl Writes About Pot in Her Diary, School Reads It and Suspends Her All Year.”
• “Felony weapons charge for student who brought fishing supplies to school.”
• “Hearing Examiner: School Was Right to Suspend Little Boy Who Chewed Pop-Tart Into Shape of Gun.”
• “Toy gun made of paper gets kid tossed from school.”
• “Drawing of Cartoon Bomb Gets Middle School Student Suspended in South Carolina.”

And on and on. I would encourage anyone who thinks Ahmed never could have been arrested for bringing a clock to school if his name was John Smith to click the hyperlinks and read the stories, though the headlines say a lot on their own. Keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of the senseless zero tolerance arrests, suspensions, and expulsions suffered by white kids—these are stories I have written about, or could easily recall.

I don’t mean to suggest that these kinds of things are horrible because they happened to white kids. They are horrible, period. But the idea that white kids are immune to mistreatment at the hands of cops and school officials is both false and dangerous.

I accept that it’s perfectly plausible—if not yet definitively proven—racism played a role in the specific case of Ahmed Muhamed. And it’s certainly true that poor and minority youths are at greater risk of mistreatment. Studies show schools discipline black and Latino kids more harshly and more frequently than white kids who commit the same offenses.

But it would be a grave mistake to zero-in on racism as the main problem here, because ridiculous over-enforcement of school disciplinary policies is only partly a race issue. No child is safe from having his or her rights’ trampled by assertive cops at school as long as paranoia about school safety and petty rules outlawing perfectly safe, normal teen behavior remain in place. Cops arrest kids for bringing harmless toys that vaguely resemble weapons to school. Schools suspend kids for talking, writing, or merely just thinking about said weapons while on school premises, or near school premises, or even just near the bus stop on their own front lawns.

If cops made these arrests, and schools decreed these suspensions, in an entirely race-neutral and even-handed way, the arrests and suspensions would still be wrong. By all means, let’s reduce racist enforcement of stupid authoritarian government policies, but let’s not lose sight of the more important goal: the elimination of these policies, and the climate of paranoia about school violence that inspired them, altogether.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/16/liberals-making-istandwithahmed-about-ra

[ready4ONE 5,400]

Lost advocating removal of paranoia? Sort of correct, the clock incident is yet another example of how the school system and zero tolerance can run amok and lead to crazy responses from the educational system but it is a bit of a cop-out distracting from why this child got the response he did for bringing his home made clock to school. I don't buy for a second that Caucasian little Jimmy would have been arrested for this. The logical outcome of the paranoid belief that all Muslims are suspect is the response this poor kid got.

[decocker 7,198]

Hey Liberals, #IStandwithAhmed Isn't Only About Racism. It's About School Zero Tolerance Insanity.

Kids of all colors are at risk while paranoia reigns supreme in public schools.

Irving, Texas, ninth-grader Ahmed Muhamed brought a harmless, homemade clock to school to impress his engineering teacher. But he made more of an impression on the police officers who slapped him in handcuffs, hauled him to the station, and accused him of perpetrating a bomb hoax.

As evidenced by Twitter—#IStandWithAhmed—everybody is on Ahmed’s side (with the possible exception of his school’s officials, who sent a letter home to parents alerting them to the non-incident). Even President Obama tweeted, “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.” His message was retweeted 200,000 times in the past three hours.

I stand with Ahmed, too. But I also stand with Alex Stone.

Who is Alex Stone? He’s the South Carolina 16-year-old who was arrested and suspended last year for writing a purely fictional story about a dinosaur in which he killed the prehistoric beast with a gun. Stone was a white kid.

I bring up his race for one reason, and one reason only: Some are suggesting that Ahmed’s race is the only reason he was treated so badly. This is the obvious, inescapable conclusion, according to many left-leaning pundits: school officials identified a kid with an Islamic-sounding name, saw him carting around a device he had built, and cried terrorist!

Mic’s Jon Levine called the incident “anti-Muslim bigotry” and “hypocrisy,” and implied that white kids routinely get away with far worse behavior. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp put it this way:

It's hard to see this as anything but blatant, naked Islamophobia: Police surely would not have hauled off a white kid because of a clock.

This is a popular sentiment on Twitter right now—popular, but dead wrong.

White kids are disciplined—and yes, arrested—for mild misbehavior in schools all the time. It literally happens every day. It happens to white kids. It happens to black kids. It happens to boys and girls, preschoolers and teenagers, athletes and eggheads, wealthy and poor, gay and straight, religious and atheists; it happens all the time, to young people of all stripes.

Note that that I’m not speculating; I’m not suggesting that what happened to Ahmed could have happened to a white kid. I’m asserting that very similar things have happened to white kids—and black, brown, Asian, Indian, and Latino kids—on a routine basis.

Alex Stone is just one example. Here are some others:

• “Little Boy Suspended for Pointing Finger Like a Laser Gun.”
• “School Suspends Kid for Twirling Pencil & Subjects him to 5-HOUR Evaluation!”
• “Kid Twirls a Pencil in Class, N.J. Threatens to Take Him From His Dad and Requires Blood and Urine Testing.” (Pencil-twirling: the hidden dangers of America’s schools, evidently.)
• “Girl Writes About Pot in Her Diary, School Reads It and Suspends Her All Year.”
• “Felony weapons charge for student who brought fishing supplies to school.”
• “Hearing Examiner: School Was Right to Suspend Little Boy Who Chewed Pop-Tart Into Shape of Gun.”
• “Toy gun made of paper gets kid tossed from school.”
• “Drawing of Cartoon Bomb Gets Middle School Student Suspended in South Carolina.”

And on and on. I would encourage anyone who thinks Ahmed never could have been arrested for bringing a clock to school if his name was John Smith to click the hyperlinks and read the stories, though the headlines say a lot on their own. Keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of the senseless zero tolerance arrests, suspensions, and expulsions suffered by white kids—these are stories I have written about, or could easily recall.

I don’t mean to suggest that these kinds of things are horrible because they happened to white kids. They are horrible, period. But the idea that white kids are immune to mistreatment at the hands of cops and school officials is both false and dangerous.

I accept that it’s perfectly plausible—if not yet definitively proven—racism played a role in the specific case of Ahmed Muhamed. And it’s certainly true that poor and minority youths are at greater risk of mistreatment. Studies show schools discipline black and Latino kids more harshly and more frequently than white kids who commit the same offenses.

But it would be a grave mistake to zero-in on racism as the main problem here, because ridiculous over-enforcement of school disciplinary policies is only partly a race issue. No child is safe from having his or her rights’ trampled by assertive cops at school as long as paranoia about school safety and petty rules outlawing perfectly safe, normal teen behavior remain in place. Cops arrest kids for bringing harmless toys that vaguely resemble weapons to school. Schools suspend kids for talking, writing, or merely just thinking about said weapons while on school premises, or near school premises, or even just near the bus stop on their own front lawns.

If cops made these arrests, and schools decreed these suspensions, in an entirely race-neutral and even-handed way, the arrests and suspensions would still be wrong. By all means, let’s reduce racist enforcement of stupid authoritarian government policies, but let’s not lose sight of the more important goal: the elimination of these policies, and the climate of paranoia about school violence that inspired them, altogether.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/16/liberals-making-istandwithahmed-about-ra

omg, lib. YES. this is very true. i can't believe you posted this.

it all boils down to this...

Lost advocating removal of paranoia? Sort of correct, the clock incident is yet another example of how the school system and zero tolerance can run amok and lead to crazy responses from the educational system but it is a bit of a cop-out distracting from why this child got the response he did for bringing his home made clock to school. I don't buy for a second that Caucasian little Jimmy would have been arrested for this. The logical outcome of the paranoid belief that all Muslims are suspect is the response this poor kid got.

i'm seriously shocked. maybe he was posting ironically? has lib gone hipster?

[ready4ONE 5,400]

Lib tends to post articles he either fails to fully understand or fails to fully read. Thus it is likely that he thought that the article PROVED racism and or Islamaphobia weren't to blame, the school system and zero tolerance were. Likely the latter issues were a part of this, but I think paranoid Islamaphobia was the primary reason for this child getting arrested.

[decocker 7,198]

Lib tends to post articles he either fails to fully understand or fails to fully read. Thus it is likely that he thought that the article PROVED racism and or Islamaphobia weren't to blame, the school system and zero tolerance were. Likely the latter issues were a part of this, but I think paranoid Islamaphobia was the primary reason for this child getting arrested.

i see.

but while there are plenty of examples of white kids and zero tolerance, the science still shows that zero tolerance affects nonwhite people more often..

for example the video i posted shows how many black kids were suspended out of school for using cellphones in class compared to white kids. of course all kids will be affected by zero tolerance policies. zero tolerance completely rids disciplinarians the option of using their own judgement, their own reason. all while blowing the door wide open for any paranoid or racist illusions the disciplinarian conciously (or subconciously) holds to run wild.

another example, i don't know the race of the kid.

At first blush it sounds like an open-and-shut school disciplinary matter in a zero-tolerance age:

Some schoolchildren claim another student bragged about having marijuana. They inform school administrators. An assistant principal finds a leaf and a lighter in the boy’s knapsack. The student is suspended for a year. A sheriff’s deputy files marijuana possession charges in juvenile court.

All of the above and more happened last September to the 11-year-old son of Bedford County residents Bruce and Linda Bays. He was a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School.

There was only one problem: Months after the fact, the couple learned the substance wasn’t marijuana. A prosecutor dropped the juvenile court charge because the leaf had field-tested negative three times.

Their son remains out of school — he’s due to return Monday on strict probation. But in the meantime, the events of the past six months have wreaked havoc on the formerly happy-go-lucky boy’s psyche. His parents say he’s withdrawn socially, and is now under the care of a pediatric psychiatrist for panic attacks and depression.

The couple — both are schoolteachers — have filed a federal lawsuit against Bedford County Schools and the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office. It refers to their son only by the initials R.M.B.

It alleges Bedford Middle School Assistant Principal Brian Wilson and school operations chief Frederick “Mac” Duis violated his due process rights under the U.S. Constitution.

“Essentially they kicked him out of school for something they couldn’t prove he did,” said Roanoke attorney Melvin Williams, the Bays’ lawyer.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/columns_and_blogs/columns/dan_casey/casey-not-pot-gets-th-grader-in-big-trouble/article_67dc2868-0f0a-53c0-96ad-595a88391aa3.html

Lib tends to post articles he either fails to fully understand or fails to fully read. Thus it is likely that he thought that the article PROVED racism and or Islamaphobia weren't to blame, the school system and zero tolerance were. Likely the latter issues were a part of this, but I think paranoid Islamaphobia was the primary reason for this child getting arrested.

and yes, i agree.

[lostinblue 1,989]

On the left is an actual briefcase bomb. On the right is Ahmed Mohamed’s fake briefcase bomb, and liberals think that teachers and police should automatically know the difference just by looking.

[decocker 7,198]

On the left is an actual briefcase bomb. On the right is Ahmed Mohamed’s fake briefcase bomb, and liberals think that teachers and police should automatically know the difference just by looking.

again, shame of the teacher who actually thought ahmed had a bomb in school and didn't immediately evacuate the school and call in a bomb squad.

i don't know about you, but when i was in middle school ( and this was way before 9/11) if someone called on the phone and said "bomb in the school" we were all out of there like lightening and the school was searched.