Ken Berwitz
For two weeks now, the Dallas Morning Newshas championed ahmed mohamed\’s case – sympathizing with his plight, talkingabout islamophobia and, in general, pretending that this hoax – let me say itagain louder: THIS HOAX – is real.
It is a measure of the power of the press- or just how selectively responses are cherry-picked, that when the paper putup a “Sounding Off: Readers discuss reaction to Ahmed Mohamed\’sclock” page, of the 27 comments (as I write this), 25 supported hoaxster ahmed mohamed. And the paper positioned the two which did not (one supported the schooland police actions, the other just “understood” them) at #25 and #26on the list.
A reminder for you, excerpted from my September 20th blogon the subject:
Congratulations to 14 year old ahmed mohamed (his name now will go uncapitalized).
Not for creating a clock and being victimized by his Irving Texas high school when he brought it in to show to his teachers……but for pulling the guts out of a 1986 model Radio Shack clock, putting them into a suspicious-looking case that could easily have housed a bomb, and bringing it into school to create exactly the furor that it caused.When I first wrote about ahmed mohamed, I made a point of saying that it was wrong to associate Muslims, in general, with terrorism. I mentioned that I knew many muslims over the years who were terrific people and we all should know better than to generalize this way.That still goes. 100%.But in THIS SPECIFIC case? It is a virtual certainty that we are looking at a hoax. A set-up. A kid, probably put up to it by his publicity-hound father (who has pulled stunts like this before) to create an incident.
An excellent piece by Scott Greer of dailycaller.com says virtually the same thing, and talks a great deal about how so many media venues – the Dallas Morning News being far from the only one – were first hoaxed, and now have allowed the hoax to continue (possibly out of embarrassment that they were hoaxed in the first place).
