Do you remember Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old inventive genius who brought a clock he had made from scratch into an Irving, Texas school and, because he was Muslim, the faculty decided he must be a terrorist with a bomb so they called the police who tossed him in solitary confinement for several years with only gruel and pig’s feet to eat, and he heroically survived and now wants nothing more than minimal compensation for the pain and suffering?
Boy, I hope not.
Because what actually happened is that then-14 year old ahmed mohamed took an old Radio Shack Micronta clock out of its case, put it in a pencil case in a way that made it look for all the world like a bomb, which he carried as conspicuously as he could to make sure others saw it.
That didn’t work.
So he plugged it in during his English class and put on the alarm setting, to make it start beeping.
That did work.
When faculty got scared – as they should have – police were called. His clock was confiscated. He was arrested and held – for less than a day – during which he was interrogated and it was determined that there was no bomb.
If I were the 14 year old who, during a time when terrorist bombings were constantly in the news, brought a device that looked like a homemade bomb to my high school and set off the beep-beep-beep alarm, not only would my father have thanked the police, I would have probably wished that I was still in custody rather than face him at home afterwards.
But ahmed mohamed’s father, mohamed mohamed, an “entrepreneur” who has spent years desperately trying to get someone to notice him – including running for President of his native Sudan from Texas – saw this as the opportunity of a lifetime (this assumes he wasn’t in on putting together the hoax bomb in the first place – something I, and many others, strongly suspect).
The mohameds made a huge stink out of this incident, claiming discrimination. This enchanted guilt-trippers around the country and world, who somehow managed to look beyond the obvious set-up this “clock” was used to create.
ahmed became a national celebrity. He was invited to the White House (and they criticize Trump’s decisions?). And the family was invited to live in Qatar, as honored guests (which they did – at least for a while).
But that’s not the end of this idiotic story.
The end is that the mohameds used this conocted incident to sue everyone they could think of. The city of Irving, Texas, the school, and a raft of media people, for daring to be publicly skeptical of their little game.
The good news? One by one, those lawsuits have been tossed out of court.
The latest dismissal was yesterday. From Stefan Becket’s article for CBS News:
On Thursday, Judge Sam Lindsay of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the plaintiffs had failed to prove officials discriminated against Mohamed.
In his ruling, Lindsay dismissed claims against the city and the school district, writing that the court could not “reasonably infer that any IISD employee intentionally discriminated against [Mohamed] based on his race or religion.”
He also dismissed the claim against Cummings, the principal, who Mohamed’s team said violated his civil rights and treated the boy unfairly. Lindsay wrote the plaintiff’s complaint “does not allege that [Cummings] treated [Mohamed] differently than other similarly situated students, and that the unequal treatment was based on religion or race.”
Lindsay gave the plaintiffs a deadline of June 1 to file an amended complaint to support the allegations he wrote were “factually deficient.” Susan Hutchison, an attorney representing Mohamed, told CBS News they plan to do so.
As you can see, though, it’s not over yet. This sorry family of hucksters will try again. They apparently feel that, if they keep at it, there’s got to be some way of milking big $$$ out of the radio shack clock/bomb hoax.
But I have a feeling they’re going to find out that Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result – is very applicable here.
I certainly hope so.
