Parents like me send our children to school every weekday morning entrusting the adults there to educate them and to cultivate, encourage and promote innovation and creativity among them. More importantly, I trust that my children are protected from any harm – not arrested and interrogated without my presence or that of an attorney by law enforcement officers for trying to intellectually impress the very adults we ask them to trust and with whom they spend most of their days.

So as a a mother of three public school students and a Muslim, I am outraged that 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was removed from his classes, handcuffed, led out in front of his classmates and brought to a juvenile detention center for building a homemade clock and bringing it to school to show a teacher. I am horrified that officials did not follow protocol by calling his parents or offering him an attorney–demonstrating to me that there is a special justice system set up for Muslims, including Muslim children. And it broke my heart when I read that, after his arrest he said, “It made me feel like I wasn’t human” and “it made me feel like a criminal.”

But as much as I am outraged at the treatment this young boy endured, I’m dumbfounded at the ignorance of the adults in his school including the police who literally cannot tell the difference between a clock, a bomb and a “fake bomb”, let alone the kind of kid who might bring any of the above. What message does Ahmed’s treatment by his own teachers send to American Muslim students, aspiring inventors, innovators and engineers? We have spent billions of dollars promoting the math and sciences in schools across the United States – but I guess the people who designed those outreach efforts didn’t mean for Muslim kids to take the bait.   »»» The Guardian (U.K.)

He built a small digital clock and took it to school to show to his science teacher. At this time, the eBay online auction and sales site has at least 20 vendors offering kits to build such clocks: a printed circuit board, some electronic components and a LED display–all ready to be assembled and installed in any housing chosen by the builder. Instead being encouraged by other teachers and the school administration for his efforts, the young Ahmed was arrested and denied his basic rights to have access to an attorney and to be questioned in the presence of his parents.

It is not difficult to distinguish between a clock, a real bomb and a hoax bomb. The latter two have something that is or appears to be explosive: a dynamite stick, a blasting cap, a wad of C4 “plastique”. An electronic clock has NONE of those. As one of the leaders in George Orwell’s Animal Farm says, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

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