Texas: The week started pretty terribly for Texas high school student Ahmed Mohamed. This Monday a 14-years old, who is muslim, brought a clock to school which he made out of his creativity and sadly was arrested for what police initially and falsely said was a hoax bomb.
Ahmed became a celebrity by the mid-week as his name splashed across traditional social media and he had received thousands of tweets and Facebook posts of encouragement.
President Barack Obama invited him to the White House and praised his love of science.
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.
— President Obama (@POTUS44) September 16, 2015
Reddit and Twitter offered him internships.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/644261776146632704
Google executives said they were reserving Ahmed a spot at their weekend science fair and MIT asked him to visit the campus.
Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg invited him to visit the company’s headquarters, posting, “Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed.”
The hashtags #IStandWithAhmed and #EngineersForAhmed garnered hundreds of thousands of posts and tweets.
By Thursday, more details of the 14-year-old’s arrest in Irving, Texas, came to light.
In an exclusive interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Ahmed said he was dragged out of his class at MacArthur High School by his princlipal and five officers pulled out and took him to the police station and interrogated.
He said he asked the adults if he could call his parents. “They told me ‘No, you can’t call your parents,'” Ahmed said. “‘You’re in the middle of an interrogation at the moment.’ They asked me a couple of times, ‘Is it a bomb?’ and I answered a couple of times, ‘It’s a clock.'”
“I felt like I was a criminal,” the teenager said. “I felt like I was a terrorist. I felt like all the names I was called.”
Hayes asked what he meant.
In middle school, Ahmed said, he had been called “bombmaker” and a “terrorist.”
“Just because of my race and my religion,” he said, adding that when he walked into the room where he was questioned, an officer reclined in a chair and remarked, “That’s who I thought it was.”
“I took it to mean he was pointing at me for what I am, my race,” the freshman explained.
Ahmed is not going back to MacArthur — he’s transferring to another school, his father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed said. The family has not yet picked a new school for Ahmed, he said, and is exploring options inside and outside of the country.
