In 2015 14 year old Ahmed Mohammed was arrested for bringing in a clock he "created" that his teacher thought looked like a bomb. This set off a firestorm, started the #IStandWithAhmed trend on social media and culminated with an invitation to NASA and the White House to show off his "invention"
Also everything he said, to anyone who knew anything, made it very very clear he had zero idea about anything technical and was bluffing massive amounts from a very uninformed standpoint.
There is a reason it suddenly vanished from public eye really. Interviews with them were just embarrassing, clearly fraudulent as if nobody would know better and call them out...
I remember Obama, MIT, and Muslims nationwide came rallying to his defense. When he began talking, when the device was fully show (and revealed he took the inner workings of a clock and just put it in a suitcase), when it was revealed he set the al of his “suit case clock” to go off in class after being told not to show it around, and his parents began trying to extort people with lawsuits, everyone who had “rallied” to him suddenly acted like he didn’t exist.
Yeah, it was striking how desperate they wanted (and people initially did) believe they were victims of racist bigots.
Then the truth came out. Instead of saying “we overreacted, the family are scam artists, we’re sorry”, they just… tried sweeping it under the rug. Thankfully the internet always remembers.
That’s why after Daddy’s failed extortion suits were all tossed they ran away to Qatar.
Yes. And he kept messing around with it in class and plugging it into the wall even after he was asked multiple times to stop, before the teacher finally became suspicious and contacted police.
Which was the intended outcome the whole time. The family soaked up all the publicity and money that came with it, then promptly moved to Qatar.
Bonus fact: his sister was suspended from the same school for falsely accusing another student of saying that that she (clock kid’s sister) was going to bomb the school.
I always thought this was ludicrous even way back when this happened.
When details came out it almost felt like his parents set him up cause I believe they gave him permission or convinced him to take it in? And then they're the ones that made the brought it to the news? Iirc. I may be wrong. But I remember that being the impression back in the day.
And he got given so many offers to colleges iirc and he just pulled a computer apart lol. I mean, I hope 11 years later it all turned out great for him. Just not the "bright future" I imagine when schools offer to young kids like that
Once I was testing a computer and had the motherboard and all the components stretched out on a table. Someone that came over couldn't get over how they thought it was astounding
The media pushed the "invented" narrative. They literally assigned the public's opinion right before our very eyes!
His dad brought the kid with him back to his native country I believe.
To clarify, he didn't get in trouble for bringing a disassembled clock to school. He got in trouble because he got confrontational when asked about it.
His parents are professional grifters that filled multiple islamophobia lawsuits. After this one they fled back to Qatar only to return a few years later 🤔
It was just a clock radio he took apart and put into a case, he didn't invent anything. He apparently wouldn't put it away and kept making it go off. His sister came and took the picture that went viral. It was kind of a classic hoax and nobody quite dared to call him out on it.
This guy took a clock out of its housing, and put it in a metal suitcase, in an arrangement which looks extremely similar to a hollywood bomb. His Dad, a 'civil rights activist' encouraged him to take it to school. while there, a teacher advised him to leave it in his backpack because it might get mistaken for a bomb. The kid, being a kid, didn't listen, took his thing that looked very much like a bomb to the uninformed out and behold, people thought it looked very much like a bomb and were concerned.
And then we watched the media launch an absolute TIDAL WAVE of a concerted propaganda push, using social engineering trying to tell Americans how to think about this situation. They were acting like he was some genius inventor who made Tesla look like a toddler, who was being ruthlessly suppressed by the spanish inquisition just for having a bit more melanin than average.
A lot of people who should have known better, including Obama, fell for it.
I dated a teacher here in North Texas during this incident and this kid was a well know troublemaker. He (they) did it for the attention they knew it would get.
This is what his clock looked like by the way. I can't imagine why his English teacher thought it might be a bomb or why this budding scientist was trying to show off his "invention" to his English teacher.
It is though fun to look back at reddit threads like this one where they are praising him for being a genius and calling for the teacher and principal from the school to be arrested.
Honestly, as someone who builds electronics, just about any drawing or avtual design that isn't in a 3d printed enclosure looks like a bomb to a layperson. I've had friends and family joke about this many times especially when I have a breadboard with lots of cables, less so with a clean custom PCB. One time I was watching Fauda and they had a shot of a guy making a bomb, and frankly, it looked VERY similar to my workspace. He was going at it with a soldering iron lol. In that moment, I understood where they were coming from.
It's also why I refuse to fly with any DIY electronic if it looks DIY at all. Not everything is about race.
(WHICH TECHNICALLY IS POSSIBLE. A PERSON COULD MAKE A SIMPLE CPU USING A BREADBOARD, AND THEY COULD SOLDER THE WIRES ON THE BREADBOARD IF THEY WANTED TO MAKE A MESS FOR NO REASON BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT WHEN HE SAID HE SOLDERS HIS OWN CPUS)
Reddit idiots didn't really want to talk about why he kept turning on the clock during class, requiring him to plug it in, after his teacher told him not to.
This entire thing was planned and idiots took the bait.
Yeah his dad is a known grifter with many lawsuits under his belt. He didn’t build anything. They took apart an already built clock and spread the parts around to look like a bomb.
Absolutely. It was all a setup so the family could scream islamaphobia and get glazed by the leftwing US media and other left leaning places like Reddit during a major election cycle. And it worked exactly as planned.
This sort of incident is a great reminder that "peak woke" was going on for a lot longer than people think. I'm sure a lot of folks recognized the obvious provocation at the time, but the atmosphere was just so heated that you couldn't point out the obvious (that it looks just like a bomb) without being painted as a republican.
I met his father. He was a taxi driver, and was very political , told us he ran for president in his country. Had a lot of radical views. This happened after I met him. Almost sure the whole thing was a political stunt planned by his family.
Yes, I also came across the family at the time and they were quite radical. I'm not sure if they played Obama or he played into it with his divisive comments.
I did similar stupid shit when I was a kid tbh. Taking things apart, half putting them back together with other things trying to "invent" something. Sometimes my dad would intervene, like when he showed me how to short out the capacitors on our VCR so I wouldn't get shocked. Now I do the same shit but a little better.
But anyway I have a slightly similar story to this kid. I found a ground prong in my dad's toolbox once (that he cut off a three prong electrical cord) and figured it was the perfect tool to strike individual ring caps (the little explosive things for cap guns) using a hammer. I accidentally brought it to school once (sans caps and hammer) and was fidgeting with it. My teacher saw it and confiscated it, and brought me to the principles office. She was very distraught and worried but wouldn't tell me why. I explained exactly what it was for but as a second grader I may not have communicated clearly. I sat in the principles office until my dad showed up and they talked to him. Then I went back to class, like nothing happened. Later my dad explained the fucking moron teacher thought it was a live bullet and wanted the principle to call the cops, but they called my dad instead and he came in and told them what it was.
pic related, the guts of (half of) an ergonomic keyboard I recently made, with a built in USB hub (plus headphone jack and SD card reader!). Point is the kid was probably doing something innocent that got misinterpreted and it seems the parents may have tried to cash in on the islamophobia they sensed. And his shitty meanderings with taking stuff apart could actually be the beginning of a fun and productive hobby, as silly as it looks now.
The kid didn’t create anything. He essentially removed the guts from a digital clock and put them in a suitcase. His father was also a grifter that would file lawsuits for various things. This particular lawsuit was dismissed and they were ordered to pay court costs. They then moved to Qatar.
when I was five in 96 i brought a plastic toy grenade to school (it was a noisemaker that you would load with those capgun caps and drop to make it pop). It was obviously fake. They called the cops and brought my parents in. I was white though so I guess it didn't matter to the press or president at the time. No awards for me.
In 6th grade I took a 2x4 and mounted a barbecue starter on it with wires connecting it to two nails hammered in the end of the 2x.
While me and my brothers had a lot of fun zapping each other with it, the principal wasn’t pleased when I brought it to school, and suspended me for bringing in a “stungun.” Told me I was lucky she disnt call the cops to arrest me. What a joke. This was in like 92 so it was well before Columbine.
I was a teacher in the district at the time (different HS campus). The next day, in protest, many students and teachers wore clocks around their necks. One teacher on my campus was so mad he was holding the clock out and saying "This is a bomb!" I had to tell him, "You can't actually say that. That's really a crime, to say that you brought a bomb to school."
It's pretty sad that the kid was obviously put up to it by his father, (A political activist who ran for president of Sudan 2x), definitely knew what would happen when you rip the casing off a clock, throw it in a briefcase, and march it into a school just to weaponize the media response.
He'd been told repeatedly to stop taking it to classes and messing with it lol, it was incredibly obvious to anyone who read the whole story what was going on. The clock he "built" was literally just an alarm clock they destroyed and glued the guts inside of a small briefcase to look like a movie bomb lol
This was during the beginning of their push to paint third-worlders as victims that the West owed and needed to bring in..
I remember back in the day that being my impression of the situation too.
It was literally a bunch of wires and a digital clock in a briefcase. It 100% looks fishy. But it was blown up as if nooooo.... That could never beeee!
You have no idea how absolutely tired I am of reading this story while people/bots completely leave out the part where he was warned ahead of time by a teacher in private to hide it in his backpack because someone could easily mistake it for a bomb
And then he started showing it off to everyone all day, oh, and it's worth mentioning that his father basically orchestrated all of this for a publicity campaign
It was a clock that he took apart and put into a brief case. It sounded an alarm multiple times.
There was some info going around that the dad was also trying to get a lawsuit or had done one already for racial discrimination, supposedly.
Really does not take much to put the puzzle pieces together...
I think the teacher was right to be cautious. Kids just bringing something like this into school without telling anyone what is first could actually be trouble. When it comes to safety, especially of other people's kids, it's better to be safe than sorry than to let something go just because it might be perceived a certain way. Teachers are trained specifically to do this with mystery objects they can't identify.
Imagine if it was a bomb and the teacher said nothing and a bunch of kids got hurt. That's not a scenario anyone wants to be in.
Ahmed Mohamed—widely known as "clock boy" after his 2015 arrest in Irving, Texas—is now in his mid-20s and has spent the years following the incident studying and living primarily in Qatar on a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation
I remember hearing about this a long time ago and honestly it wasn't even racism. If a white guy tried pulling that i'd still think thats highly suspicious.
This was the first news story I remember in which the media, just outwardly didn’t care about the truth. Like there was some slanted shit but this at the fucking jump I was like wtf
As a fellow brown person, I’m just going to come out and say it. That kid built it intentionally to look like a bomb to be edgy. He deconstructed a clock and placed its components into a suit case in the same way bombs are depicted in movies. More than likely just to show to his friends as a joke. And when he got in trouble he simply claimed it was just a clock that he “invented”. There is no reason for a kid to have made this, and brought it to school to show his English teacher of all teachers. He did this as a joke, and got in trouble, panicked, and hid behind feigned ignorance and claimed racism.
His sister had already been suspended for a bomb threat. The teachers repeatedly told him to stop while he wouldn't. Until they couldn't ignore their own policies anymore a student pretending to have a bomb at the school all day.
Aside from the zero tolerance rule, just imagine one lawsuit from a kid that went home and told his parents a student kept setting off an alarm in a box of wires all day and the teachers did nothing but tell him to put it away.
The world was in a really different situation when this happened. It was a publicity move more than anything. He did it specifically because he wanted them to have a reaction. It was very political at the time. If I remember correctly, Barack Obama tweeted that he wanted him to bring that device to the White House afterwards. Whole thing was strange.
It is baffling to me that parents do this to their kids. Like the parents who sued Sesame Place for $25 Million for a costume character ‘ignoring’ their Black girls.
The lawsuit was thrown out by a judge but the parents had already had press conferences and news spots featuring the kids broadcasted to millions. I’d die of humiliation.
late night dramas did the same thing, they needed to portray a bomb in a movie, so they took apart a clock, lol. A reminder how fiction warps perspective
I remember hearing about that in 2015 and thinking racism sucks, and then coming across the story again 5 years later with more information and getting the strong impression there was some funny business
Oooohhh I remember this one, that 100000% looked like a bomb lmao. Reddit was super in their feelings about it wanting to get people cooked but lets be real.
At best it was a misunderstanding, at worse the kid knew what he was doing and maybe was trying to prove a point or he was just fucking around.
I mean he has a random transformer going to what looks like a fake deadmans switch at the bottom. Guessing that is for AC power as he has a 9v battery hookup on the left. Yeah, I could see how a non-technical person could get scared of this
Kid builds a fake bomb and his Dad played over-empathetic, race-essentialist liberals like a fiddle, including President Obama, to rake in a shit ton of financial donations and ditch the country.
Personally, I loved the reasons behind the division of the dress color; the science was pretty neat. But the insane social media tribalism it spawned was incredibly depressing.
I remember getting called an Islamophobe, racist, xenophobic, and bigoted for thinking it looked like a bomb, btw. Now, even progressives will say "yeah this looks bad". This was one of the points where I realized how silly progressive politics are. You can't call a spade a spade without being call a -phobe or accused of an -ism
This is where context matters. The teacher initially told the kid to stop playing with it and put it away. So obviously the teacher did not initially think it was a bomb.
Imagine doing something to troll your teacher, lying about it to get out of trouble, and then having to go to the white house because the lie just got out of hand
I remember this incident very well. it wasn't a good move to build it that way. His parents encouraged that design. They were looking for public sympathy.
I remember this. The kid did not build a clock! This thing was built by him and his dad in order to provoke this response! They did not build a clock as a project, they used a clock in a project made to look like a bomb! I believed at the time that this was a test to see what the response would be and to “cry wolf” so people would not pay attention to future bomb looking devices!
He's named Muhammed, he's muslim, and he brought an unidentifiable device with wires and a battery to his school. Sorry, not sorry, there are other kids to worry about too. I know it sucks but....
Yea when this story came out originally I had no doubt that he/his father was trying to something controversial to get praise or media attention. Never believed it for a second
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u/NecessaryCockroach85 1d ago
The whole thing is dumb. Didn't he just take the clock out of it's housing and just put it in a suitcase?