"Hopefully, we can all learn from this week's events and the student, who has obvious gifts, will not feel at all discouraged from pursuing his talent in electronics and engineering."
Anti-Muslim bigotry in America is out of controlFor Max Fisher, Foreign Editor at Vox.com, the arrest of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, was completely in line with a problem that has been growing over the past year: Islamophobia, which is the fear-based hatred of Muslims, is out of control in American society.
To understand why a Texas school would arrest a 14-year-old student for bringing in a homemade clock, it helps to understand what came before: the TV news hosts who declare Muslims "unusually barbaric," the politicians who gin up fear of Islam, the blockbuster film that depicts even Muslim children as dangerous threats, and the wave of hatred against Muslims that has culminated several times in violence so severe that what happened to Mohamed, while terrible, appears unsurprising and almost normal within the context of ever-worsening American Islamophobia.
Many Americans might be totally unaware this is happening, even though they are surrounded by Islamophobia: on TV, at airport security, in our pop culture and our politics, and inevitably in our schools. Perhaps, then, Mohamed's arrest will be a wake-up call.
American Islamophobia has grown so severe that, even looking just at the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Mohamed's Dallas suburb, one can see, in broad daylight, the climate of hostility and fear America's 2.6 million (read 7 million) Muslims have been made to live in.
Marcus Wohlsen of Wired.com wrote: What would happen if kids across the country decided to take their own homemade clocks to school that they made following those instructions? Who knows. Maybe if enough young people make clocks, teachers and police will at least learn what a clock looks like, even on the inside. Or, if that's too much to ask, maybe they'll just learn to trust their students when they describe what they've made. We get it: technology can be scary: after all, open up any computer or smart phone, and what's inside? Circuits! Or should we say, a hoax bomb waiting to happen.
The ACLU of Texas, executive director Terri Burke said, "Ahmed Mohamed's avoidable ordeal raises serious concerns about racial profiling and the disciplinary system in Texas schools. Instead of encouraging his curiosity, intellect, and ability, the Irving ISD saw fit to throw handcuffs on a frightened 14 year-old Muslim boy wearing a NASA t-shirt and then remove him from school."
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