"It’s hard not to feel sorry for the boy. The family’s announcement of their decision to move to Qatar, a day after meeting with Obama, suggests that the episode was part of some bizarre scam engineered by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed al-Hassan Mohamed. As our friends at Powerline have shown in their excellent coverage of the story, it’s pretty clear that Ahmed’s clock was designed to look and sound just like what the boy’s teacher and the Irving, Texas police department believed it was—a bomb. Given that many Americans are apparently willing to tear up the second amendment for fear of teenage psychopaths opening fire on their classmates, it’s hard to see how the police overreacted by bringing the boy downtown for questioning.
"The interesting part was how another storyline trumped the school shooter narrative—Islamophobia.
"To wit: Ahmed’s teacher and the police weren’t concerned he was some adolescent loser looking to murder as many people as possible with an explosive device, they’re just racists who think that every Muslim is basically a Bin Laden biding his time. By playing the two narratives against each other, Ahmed’s father, perhaps unintentionally, highlighted something disturbing about the country he is leaving for Qatar—the Americans say how much they love their children, but threaten to expose them as racists and you can put them in a hard place.
"Anyway, it wasn’t a real bomb. No one got hurt. We just got played for suckers, especially Obama. It’s instructive that the president of the United States got played worse than anyone since it’s a typically American story, in spite of the Middle Eastern flavor. "
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