Silicon Valley Supports Texas Teen Ahmed Mohamad

[Riaz Haq]

A 14-year-old Muslim teenager Ahmed Mohammad was arrested in Texas when he showed his teacher a clock he had built at home. The teacher mistook the student's invention for a bomb and called in the police who handcuffed the Sudanese-American teen and escorted him down the hallway, out the school building and to a juvenile detention center.

The incident was highlighted by the Council on American Islamic Relations, a American Muslim Civil Rights group, as another egregious manifestation of anti-Muslim bigotry that prevails in many parts of the United States.

There has been significant outpouring of support for Ahmed since the incident came to light. President Barack Obama invited Ahmed to the White House via a tweet that said: "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great". It was followed by a tweet from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton that said: "Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building.

Many top Silicon Valley technology executives also took to the social media to support Ahmed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in, inviting the Texas teen to visit the tech giant's Menlo Park campus. Google invited Mohamed to its annual youth science fair in Mountain View this weekend. And Box CEO Aaron Levie also extended an invitation. Twitter has also extended an invitation to Mohammad to visit its office in San Francisco.  Popular twitter hashtag #IStandWithAhmed in support of Ahmed Mohamad has been trending for several days now.

Some elite US schools, including Harvard and MIT, have invited Ahmed Mohamad to visit their campuses.

Would this story have found much traction without the social media? I doubt it. It was the growing power of the new media that led to the teen's release from custody on Wednesday after 2 days of detention.  During this time, he was elevated to the status of an American folk hero.

As we celebrate the meteoric rise of Ahmed Mohammad to celebrity status, we must not forget the long history of bigotry and violence against natives and minorities in this country. Even President Obama has been a frequent target of racists. Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump's vicious attacks on Mexican immigrants and his rapid rise in the national polls is an indication that racial and religious bigotry remain alive and well in the United States. We must support organizations such as CAIR and ACLU that stand against this tide to assure implementation of the Bill of Rights for all Americans, including women and minorities. We must also make use of social media to highlight social problems that are spun or left uncovered by the mainstream commercial media.

Watch this video apparently posted by Islamophobes on Obama's religion:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbqw2t_obama-admits-he-is-a-muslim...



https://youtu.be/eMk__PWjoSk




Related Links:

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King's Hypocrisy

FBI Entrapping Young Muslims in Phony Terror Plots?

I'm Not Charlie; I'm Ahmed

[Riaz Haq]

Harassment, punishment in school doesn't end with Ahmed #IStandWithAhmed by @mathewrodriguez #Islamophobia http://mic.com/articles/125446/meet-the-muslim-students-who-have-be... …


"In middle school, I was physically grabbed by a security guard and dragged across the lunch room," Talia, a 20-year-old Muslim college student from Queens, New York, told Mic. Not knowing which door to use, Talia (who did not disclose her last name because of her undocumented status) entered her middle school cafeteria through the wrong door for the second time. "He just grabbed me, dragged me across the lunchroom and took me to the other side. Nobody said anything," she said. 

Talia never reported the incident, to avoid interaction with authorities. "You're supposed to do what authority tells you to do and as an undocumented person, I've always been taught to stay safe, put your head down, go to school and don't push back or anything," she said. 

Talia is not alone. According to a 2006 report from Desis Rising Up and Moving, 26% of South Asian students are afraid to give any kind of personal information to authorities and among South Asian non-U.S. citizens, the number is 34%. The report, "Education Not Deportation," details South Asian students' experiences in New York City schools. 

Talia is a youth leader at DRUM, a community-based organization that organizes working-class South Asian adults and youth around issues of racial and educational justice in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens.

Rishi Singh, educational justice organizer at DRUM, told Mic that Talia's stories reflect an increasing tension in New York City's public schools — and nationwide — since the adoption of controversial zero-tolerance policies. 

"I think all students, particularly students of color, they don't feel like their school is a school, they feel like it's a jail," he told Mic. "They feel they've done something wrong every time they go through scanning in the morning."

Many New York City school students, including the Muslim students who spoke to Mic, must pass through a metal detector every day, which the New York Civil Liberties Union called "a potential flashpoint of confrontation between [school safety officers] and students," in a 2013 report on the school-to-prison pipeline. 

"Every time I would walk through, I would get wanded," Talia said. Over time, she knew to point out to security guards where the metal pins were under her hijab, though that wasn't always sufficient. She was once asked to go to the bathroom to have her hijab inspected. The only female police officer available to search her was a sergeant carrying a gun. 

"I was like, 'I'm not taking off my hijab, I'm not doing it,'" she said. They ended up giving her a rougher-than-usual inspection. "They were feeling my hijab, grabbing my hijab and my hair. I refused to go to the bathroom with the sergeant." 

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DRUM's 2006 report found that 85% of South Asian students surveyed reported harassment by school or police authorities. Thirty-one percent said their harassment was due to actual or perceived race or ethnicity, while 29% felt it was due to actual or perceived religion and 17% felt the harassment was because of their immigration status. 

For Singh and other DRUM leaders, this means that school's approach to justice must be reframed as restorative, rather than punitive, meaning infractions would not pile up and push students out of school. Singh hopes that schools can embrace a model where parties involved in confrontation can confront each other to find common ground. 

[Riaz Haq]

#Obama says he supports Ahmed Mohamed, but his policies don’t. #IStandWithAhmed http://wapo.st/1imJHdI

Obama says he supports Ahmed Mohamed, but his policies don’t. By Arjun Singh Sethi in Washington Post

the counter-extremism policies that Obama supports seem to encourage such severe responses to normal behavior in Muslim youth. While it’s easy to dispel Ahmed’s case and what happened in Irving as an aberration, fear and demonization of American Muslims is the norm.

At a White House summit in February, Obama championed the Department of Homeland Security’s “countering violent extremism” program, which calls on teachers, faith leaders and neighbors to suss out early indicators of extremism and report them to law enforcement. This federal initiative, which largely targets Muslim communities, was piloted in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston, and it is now proliferating across the country.

Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School in April 2014, Obama’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, encouraged local communities to be sensitive to subtle behavior changes among their youth, which she called “warning signs” of radicalization:

What kinds of behaviors are we talking about? For the most part, they’re not related directly to plotting attacks. They’re more subtle. For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at home — becoming confrontational. Religious leaders might notice unexpected clashes over ideological differences. Teachers might hear a student expressing an interest in traveling to a conflict zone overseas. Or friends might notice a new interest in watching or sharing violent material.

This guidance encourages a hypersensitivity to the mundane behavior of young American Muslims and demonizes acts that are protected by the First Amendment. Innocuous activities like growing a beard, attending a fiery sermon, protesting U.S. foreign policy or fraternizing with Muslim political groups become “warning signs” that are reported to police under the guise of countering violent extremism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/18/obama-s...

[Riaz Haq]

"Athiests" Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins Trolling a child in the name of #Islamaphobia #IStandWithAhmed http://www.salon.com/2015/09/21/bill_maher_and_richard_dawkins_sink... … via @Salon

Let’s say you want to be a narrow-minded bigot but you think far too highly of yourself to be lumped in with the trucker-hatted hoi polloi. You, after all, know the meaning of hoi polloi. You do the Saturday Times crossword puzzle in ink. You’re not some dumb hick. You’re an arrogant troll because you’re smart. That’s why you love Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, because they make having terrible ideas seem boldly intellectual!

Over the weekend, both Dawkins and Maher eagerly leapt to question the motives of Ahmed Mohamed, the Texas teen who was handcuffed and arrested for suspicion of bringing “a hoax bomb” to school when he showed up with a homemade clock. Mohamed’s story — one in which a school system that already had a history of questionable sentiments toward Islam had an overreaction to a scientifically Muslim curious kid — has become an international news story, culminating Mohamed receiving an invitation from the president to the White House. But where some have seen an outpouring of support for an inventive 14 year-old kid, others have wondered if there isn’t something a little more… suspicious going on here.

First, Bill Maher, who’s already clearly stated that “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas,” asserted on Friday’s “Real Time” that “This kid deserves an apology, no doubt about it. They were wrong. But could we have a little perspective about this? Did the teacher really do the wrong thing?” He drew applause when he said that the clock “looks exactly like a f__king bomb” and demanded that “Someone look me in the eye right here and tell me, over the last thirty years, if so many young muslim men… haven’t blown a lot of s__t up around the world…. It’s been one culture that’s been blowing s__t up over and over again.” Just a reminder: cultures don’t blow s__it up; extremist members of cultures do.

Then, full time crap-stirrer Dawkins took time out from retweeting fawning accolades from his fans on Sunday to just, know, ask some questions, posting a link to a YouTube clip from Thomas Talbot claiming Mohamed’s “a fraud” who didn’t invent or build the clock in question. The 74 year-old Dawkins didn’t dispute that it was wrong to arrest Mohamed, saying, “The real scandal is that he was denied his RIGHT to call his parents when being interrogated. The police violated the law.” But he did seem concerned about the alleged “fraud.” “If this is true,” he asked, “what was his motive?”

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Skepticism and curiosity are vital and sadly lacking nutrients in our daily public discourse. But it’s unfortunate that an intellectual who once had the power to provoke insightful, challenging debate has in recent years turned into a sour crank, eager to leverage his brand as a prominent atheist as an excuse to go big on Islamphobia and congratulate himself on his horrendous views on sexual assault. And it’s pathetic that Maher and Dawkins are wrapping themselves up not in the rigorous quest for knowledge they claim to stand behind but their own petty prejudices and fears — and they’re basically the same baseless, dumb crap you could get from a doofus like Sarah Palin. The difference is that their schtick has its following not among the “Duck Dynasty” watchers but the C-Span ones. And even as they peddle ignorance, they have the arrogance to believe themselves incapable of it.

[Riaz Haq]

Ben Carson, the Islamophobe, an unworthy beneficiary of the affirmative action and race-based quotas. #Islamophobia http://michronicleonline.com/2015/09/22/the-folly-of-ben-carson/ …

...And let’s not forget the affirmative action policy at the university that took in to consideration his race, socio-economic status and other factors in determining his admittance....


Two decades later, the Ben Carson running for President of the United States is hardly recognizable from the one who so sat next to me on the panel at WSU and so eloquently spoke of the need to support and nurture the potential of poor and minority youths. Nor do we hear the words of the man who so eloquently praised the work and sacrifice of civil rights icons such as Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and even lesser well known black pioneers in science and invention.
On a national stage today, when the country badly needs to hear the inspiring and affirmative words of a man who managed to successfully navigate the traps of a harsh and often unforgiving ghetto, reinforced by institutional and structural racism personified in bad schools, red lining, an absence of work and neighborhood and police violence, all we hear from Carson is the self-righteous carping of a politician who claims he has the gravitas to lead the world, but comes across as someone with an embarrassingly superficial understanding of public policy and who is submerged in the politics of complaint and the art of victim blaming.
Indeed, it was only three weeks ago when he had the audacity to go to Ferguson, Missouri and tell an audience of beleaguered black residents looking for words of hope and inspiration, that racism was not a problem in their region and that Michael Brown; the 17-year-old unarmed black youth killed by a white police officer after a confrontation over him walking in the street, was a “bad actor.” And for good measure he called the grassroots police reform effort “Black Lives Matters,” “bullies” and “sickening.”
He has attacked President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which has provided healthcare to more than 16 million previously uninsured Americans; most of them poor, many minorities, as “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”