Blackrook
Diamond Member
- Jun 20, 2014
- 21,339
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If It Walks Like an Influence Operation…
The more we learn about the facts surrounding the events in Irving, Texas this week, the more it seems we’ve been bamboozled.
The now-universal rendering of the story is that a student named Ahmed Mohamed was wrongly removed from his school in handcuffs for innocently bringing in a homemade “clock.”
The purported injustice of this story – laced with the implication that it all happened because Ahmed is a Muslim – has made him an instant celebrity, winning fawning treatment from MIT to Stephen Colbert to the White House.
The facts, however, suggest this may have been a provocation. For starters, building and bringing to school what sure looked like a trigger for an improvised briefcase bomb would predictably raise an alarm.
It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.
I called this when I first heard the story. Something seemed off about a Muslim boy building a "clock" and then getting an invitation to Face Book and the White House, and all because he was Muslim.
Many white kids have had their lives ruined by the Zero Tolerance policy, and none of them got this kind of sympathy.
The more we learn about the facts surrounding the events in Irving, Texas this week, the more it seems we’ve been bamboozled.
The now-universal rendering of the story is that a student named Ahmed Mohamed was wrongly removed from his school in handcuffs for innocently bringing in a homemade “clock.”
The purported injustice of this story – laced with the implication that it all happened because Ahmed is a Muslim – has made him an instant celebrity, winning fawning treatment from MIT to Stephen Colbert to the White House.
The facts, however, suggest this may have been a provocation. For starters, building and bringing to school what sure looked like a trigger for an improvised briefcase bomb would predictably raise an alarm.
It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.
I called this when I first heard the story. Something seemed off about a Muslim boy building a "clock" and then getting an invitation to Face Book and the White House, and all because he was Muslim.
Many white kids have had their lives ruined by the Zero Tolerance policy, and none of them got this kind of sympathy.
