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September 16, 2015

Shana Tova, Happy New Year and welcome back to our national reality. A 14-year-old technonerd in Texas was arrested for possession of a homemade clock, which he had designed himself. Yes, of course, this young man is Muslim, dark-skinned and…well, that’s it, really.

Most of you have, by now read the story. A high school student took the initiative to build a clock of his own design, housed in a metal pencil box. He took said clock to school—that is, McArthur High School in Irving, Texas, should you, for any reason wish to communicate with them—and showed it to his engineering teacher who, sensibly it turns out, advised him not to show it to anyone else. (And here is where I begin to steam. Not, “Great work, Ahmed, you should be proud of this—let’s show this to the whole faculty as an example of what STEM students can achieve!” No, more like, “Great work Ahmed, better keep it hidden in case some Islamophobic savant decides to call the bomb squad despite the fact that there is no explosive material anywhere in this device, which they could see if they opened the case to find all those scary wires and digital number counter and, oh dear God, a circuit board!”)

Indeed, the engineering teacher was more than a little prescient, because when another teacher heard the clock beep, well, one thing led to another until Ahmed found himself in a juvenile detention center, handcuffed, searched and interrogated by five officers without his parents present. There he is in the above picture, all cuffed up in his NASA t-shirt. The Irving police justify themselves with the claim that Ahmed was arrested, not for having an actual bomb, but for possession of a “fake bomb” designed to scare people. Of course, when everyone from the high school administration to the police continued to question Ahmed and he kept insisting that what he had was a clock, the charge that he was attempting to frighten anyone into thinking he had a bomb looks a little weak. And then, in this video, which accompanies an excellent piece in Vox about the incident by the first-rate journalist Ezra Klein, the police admit that Ahmed kept saying it was a clock, but was not able to satisfy them as to his intentions with it.

I’m trying to imagine this interrogation:

“What’s that you have, son?”

“It’s a clock.”

“A clock? Just what does that clock do anyway?”

“Tells time.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Aladdin! Just what did you need to know the time for anyway? What were you expecting to happen? Some explosive event maybe?”

“…fourth period?”

Max Fisher, also of Vox, reminds us that there is nothing aberrant about this incident, given the climate of hysterical Islamophobia that dominates huge swaths of the American political landscape. He documents ways in which some news media outlets circulate and re-circulate anti-Muslim tropes, inflaming fear and bigotry, a strategy which, they have learned, seems to generate reliable market share. He explains how that fear and bigotry is a terrible part of what shapes the American response to the refugee crisis now facing the world.

As it happens, Ahmed’s father, Mohammed Elhassan, a leader of Texas’ Sufi community, once mounted a campaign for the presidency of Sudan which he had no hope to win (the President/dictator, who is currently wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court, won with about 90% of the vote). He used the campaign as a platform to share his message about freedom of religion, women’s rights, free public education and democracy in general.

So let’s sum up, shall we? The scion of an immigrant family of the kind that everyone claims is exactly the right sort—educated, fervent about democracy, and eager to contribute to our country’s scientific and technological future–is humiliated in front of his peers and traumatized in custody and made to understand that, for some of his compatriots, he will always be, categorically, the very wrongest sort that ever was.

Fortunately, for this young man, things are looking up. The President has invited him to the White House. MIT and Facebook have expressed their interest in him. Surely, an apology will be forthcoming from the school. Any day now.

Need I belabor how very much reason we Jews have to identify with Ahmed’s situation? For years, before the rise of the Black civil rights movement, from which we and all minorities benefited, the most prestigious schools had quotas to limit our enrollment, and many fellow students were willing to, physically, put the skinny science and humanities nerds who made it through the obstacle course, into their proper place. During the Shoah, State Department officials like the infamous Breckinridge Long deliberately put obstacles in the path of Jewish refugees, fearing an influx of “alien” cultures and ideas. To those who persisted (and persist) in regarding our constitutional democracy as a “Christian nation,” our persistent loyalty to our own tradition represented and represents an intolerable provocation.

And now, thousands of Syrian refugees, fleeing conflicts in which our government is hopelessly entangled, are turning to us for help. Among them are many Ahmeds (and Sarahs), in NASA and MIT and Dr. Who t-shirts, struggling through the muck and dreaming of the stars. HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in 1882 to help refugees from the Czar’s pogroms and now a voice for refugees around the world, is petitioning the White House to help more of the displaced. It’s truly wonderful that the President has extended a welcome to Ahmed. Let’s ask him to broaden that welcome further.

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