HOW BIGOTRY CREATED US MUSLIM HERO
Washington, 3 Dzulhijjah 1436/17 September 2015 (MINA) – As the world rose up in support of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School student who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school, the situation has been regarded as a blow to bigotry industry, as this resulted in creating a young Muslim hero.
“Seeing what he went through it starts out with sheer enthusiasm and pride with what he’s created, and so proud of what he did when he took it to show it to the teacher and to see it just turn in that direction was just really sad,” Musaab At-Taras, vice president of engineering at Palo Alto mobile payments company Poynt and formerly with PayPal and eBay, told San Jose Mercury News.
“All of us in the industry look back on what triggered us to get involved in technology. You relate. That sense of accomplishment,” the longtime Silicon Valley tech worker said.
“You see things in a way other people don’t. This kid is impressive and people around him don’t realize it.”
The Irving Muslim student was arrested by Dallas police after his school claimed that he tried to make a bomb.
He hoped to impress his teachers by his one of his most elaborate creations that consists of a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.
After his English teacher and principal reported him to police, Ahmed was arrested and was also pulled out of sixth period.
At the police station, the Muslim teen was interrogated by four police officers, before being released. However, he was suspended for three days from his school.
#IstandwithAhmed has begun trending on social media and has drawn support not just from the United States, but the rest of the world.
The incident shed light on the Islamophobia makers, one of them is Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne who faces huge criticism as being a fear-monger who stokes the flames of Islamophobia by supporting a law banning “Shariah law court”.
“We believe this is a gross overreaction to the situation that wouldn’t have happened if his name wasn’t Ahmed Mohamed,” Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Police Mic.
In addition to being kept without his legal right to have an adult present, Hooper says Mohamed “clearly was made to undergo a ‘perp walk’ in front of his classmates in handcuffs and treated like a criminal.”
Muslim Hero
As the school administrators, police and city officials defended their position, thousands of social media users participated in #IStandWithAhmed hashtag against bigotry and discrimination.
The young Muslim’s story resonated with the most powerful nerds in the world.
“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a widely shared post on his social network.
“The future belongs to people like Ahmed.”
Zuckerberg invited Ahmed to visit the Facebook campus in Menlo Park.
Google promised to reserve him a spot at its annual youth science fair in Mountain View this weekend.
Twitter offered him an internship and Box CEO Aaron Levie also extended an invitation, insisting that the teen is really an “enterprise software guy at heart.”
Obama’s White House invitation promised a meeting with NASA scientists.
Having a passion for electronics, the teen makes his own radios, repairs his own go-kart and on Sunday spent about 20 minutes before bedtime assembling the clock using a circuit board, power supply wired to a digital display and other items.
“When I was his age, I took everything apart, too, and tried to make things,” tweeted Grant Imahara, a former host of Discovery’s San Francisco-based “MythBusters” science TV show.
“My room looked exactly like his with soldering iron, computer, circuit boards. Some homemade, some cobbled together.”
Dawud Walid, the executive director of CAIR Michigan chapter, said the identity of Muslims in America is directly rooted in American history.
“Muslims have been in this country since the first enslaved Africans were brought here. Muslims since then have influenced the American way of life in particular relating to our collective culture and our recognition of civil rights,” Walid explained.
“Morocco (a Muslim nation) was the first country to recognize the independence of America from Britain. Thomas Jefferson explicitly recognized the religious rights of Muslims.” (T/P007/R03)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
