Possibly wanted to be arrested?
Dawkins’s display of irritation with Ahmed Mohamed was even worse than I realized, because I missed one tweet. (Or maybe more than one.) I find this one really horrible.
Someone asked what he thought Ahmed’s motives were.
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
@HarryStopes I don’t know. Possibly wanted to be arrested? Police played into his hands? Anyway, now invited to White House, crowdfunded etc
That’s so hateful. It’s reminiscent of the way a bunch of obnoxious people claimed Rebecca Watson said “guys, don’t do that” as part of a cunning plan to become famous and harassed on the internet…only it’s even more so because Ahmed is fourteen years old.
It’s Paul Vale at the Huffington Post who reported on that tweet.
Maureen tells me there are stories in tomorrow’s Guardian and Independent, too.
That is STRAIGHT from the right-wing hate sites. The whole “it was planned out, wanted to be arrested, Muslim handlers came up with this, a way to get publicity, Obama, Obama Obama…” etc.
Policed played into his plans? Thats another one they have been floating. He was a teenage jihadist out to discredit police, etc. “This was all part of a plan.”
He’s getting this crap straight from the paranoiasphere.
Disgusting.
That’s certainly what it sounds like. I don’t read them enough to know the particulars, but I’m well familiar with the overall style.
Considering how dangerous some police are, I doubt any non-white kid that smart would plan to get arrested for publicity.
Having seen the photo of Ahmed as he was handcuffed and lead away, I really doubt he wanted to be arrested. The boy is clearly terrified. He’s not smirking, or proud, or defiant. All of his statements, and his family’s statements have expressed the distress and fear he experienced over a reaction he did not expect at all. Similarly, he did not seem to expect support after disclosing what happened: he is delighted, but surprised.
Dawkins can of course express his view that the boy and his family are lying. Maybe it’s time for someone in Dawkins’ family to say “Grandad, you are too cranky to use Twitter.”
This has been reported back home. Sadly, it seems to have struck a rich vein of racism and paranoia judging by the comments. I’m appalled by that. I’m also appalled and disappointed by Dawkins, but not even remotely surprised at this point.
Of course, every 14 year old’s dream is to be arrested.
I was a DPhil student at Oxford at the time Dawkins was considered the greatest thing since the talking orange, the person who had solved the “altruism problem” in evolutionary theory, a young man who would go on to do great things, which, to some extent he has. My then wife was a zoologist and so I got dragged along to various receptions and parties at which the great man was present. I can’t say I knew him well, but I was involved in some quite long conversations that he was involved in.
His background was that of a “colonial gentleman” – although the British Empire had evaporated by then – and there were a lot of them around at Oxford in the ’60s and ’70s. He and others like him, although they would be the first to deny it, would exude a sort of “natural superiority,” but, or so it seems to me, it was always accompanied by an anxiety that they would be eclipsed by someone else, maybe someone less worthy.
It is undignified for someone in Dawkins’ position to excoriate a 14 year old in this way and casts doubt on the image he likes to project of being a great educator. When I taught computer science pupils would discover or invent things all the time. Never mind that Djikstra or Wirth had made the same discovery or invented the same thing 30 years previously; it was still the students discovery or invention.
There’s a term for what Dawkins is doing here. It’s called hindsight bias.
It’s a pretty fucking basic cognitive bias, Mr. Richard “Skeptic” Dawkins.
Of course, it’s always possible that RD’s speculations are correct. Ahmad could be a mastermind with precognitive powers, after all.
Tut tut, the correct form of address here is Richard “Thought Leader” Dawkins. Obviously, Thought Leaders are immune to biases so naughty cynics need to hush and bear witness to True Scepticism.
The key to understanding Richard Dawkins is to acknowledge that the difference between Richard Dawkins and Ken Ham is not a substantive one at all. Both men organize their lives around preaching the virtue of believing in fairy tales and dehumanizing anyone who doesn’t believe in their chosen tales. That Dawkins’s preferred fairy tales do not involve a god is neither here nor there.
I think this is the logical end point of the process which started with him getting his “feminism” from Hoff Sommers; now he’s getting his news commentary from the Tea Party.
That thing earlier where I said that it sounded like Dawkins got this from Breitbart? Well… now he’s linking to Breitbart “reporting” in his tweets.
He excuses it by saying not to judge by “the company we keep…” but this is not him chatting on a message board with someone – this is him sourcing an argument from a “news source” known to fake stories.
Yeah, well, Dick, clearly, you only tweeted this because you wanted to be despised.
(Well played, accordingly.)
I’ve a son myself quite fond of circuit boards. Oddly enough, he brought one to school himself late last week as a ‘show us your life/interests in several objects’ exercise. It was little Propeller microcontroller thing… Maybe looks a little less scary to the not-very-technoliterate than a partially point to point wired thing in a briefcase, but still…
… also, in the park Sunday, he and I were launching rockets. One of which is a sorta ‘hydrogen bullet’ thing that makes its own hydrogen through electrolysis, then ignites it (yes, we were setting off actual explosions, albeit rather small ones, that do little more than make a nice little pop and fling a plastic tube rocket thing skywards). The others are your standard hissing higher-climbing black powder Estes things. All of ’em might look a bit alarming to anyone doesn’t know the stuff. Ignition wires and boxes with buttons on ’em… The hydrogen one even has these slightly scary fifties mad scientist electrodes poking into it, now, as that’s how it now ignites the hydrogen (12 kV spark generator, from a BBQ igniter set I drilled into it to replace a dumber heated coil system that broke down after the leads corroded).
And listen, I can assure Dick and anyone else, the anxieties the optics of all this might arouse in some notwithstanding, my son and myself have no interest in being arrested. Though I figure it’s not real likely, as we both look pretty white, with fairly white names (my son does, however, for the record, have much immediate Arab ancestry, through his mother, something I find myself dwelling upon, this week especially, given his interests, after that story broke)…
No, on the contrary, we were and are interested in building and tinkering. Something I think, and as others have publically opined, we really would do well to encourage in children and anyone else. In our increasingly technologically saturated world, people who actually know how things are put together are, I think, something we have an interest in having around.
It’s funny. One of the maybe slightly uncharitable things I found myself thinking on reading the Texas story is: well, seriously, why am I even surprised? Quite apart from the blatant xenophobia on display, there’s the technical illiteracy–it doesn’t take that much to tell the difference between a clock and a bomb. I was muttering a bit about that, too, thinking, geez, it’s just a bit sad–so do the academic staff and police in Texas seriously know anything outside how to pass football players through the system without making them too late for practise? And cue and reference lots of rants written on the same–the general attitude in a lot of the US toward knowledge and curiosity in certain technical and geeky fields. And so it was heartening to see lots of scientific and technical people step up to say, no, geeky kids interested in building clocks are all right in our books, and please stop arresting them…
Well, some scientific and technical people were helpful. Some dumbass evolutionary biologists, apparently, given a too brown budding engineer, apparently, are still just as dumbass as ever.
Seriously, get stuffed, Dawk. For a guy once apparently knew his way around an Apple II, you’ve sure become a complete fucking twit when the chips are down. We need people to be interested in these fields. Brown or white. Maybe brown from Muslim background especially, I might suggest, though that’s a larger (though related) discussion.
Twitter is a very blunt instrument, and if Dawkins wanted to say something about a reasonably complex occurrence, he should have one it on Twitter, because there is no room on Twitter for nuance or qualification. However – and I have only listened to the interview with Ahmed on YouTube and one other convincing article that showed that the so-called “invention” was not really an invention and was merely the reassembling of an existing clock in an unusual container – there are a few things that are slightly disturbing about the incident. The first thing is that it seems not to have been an invention, but a matter of taking apart a 1980’s digital clock and housing it in what looked a bit like a small briefcase. But the really disturbing part is where Ahmed says in an interview something to the effect that he didn’t to lock it, which would make it seem suspicious, so he fastened it with a cable (or string, I suppose). But why did he think it might look suspicious? And this leads to the question: Why did he take an ordinary digital clock and rehouse it in a suspicious looking package and call it an invention? And if he thought that, why did he take it to school?
That there seems to have been over-reaction on the part of the school seems evident, but what, in the US, counts as over-reaction to a suspicious looking package? And does tying it up with a string make it look any less suspicious? Apparently, his father is a Muslim activist, and it’s not beyond reason that someone like him (especially if he has any relationship with CAIR, which has a quesitonable reputation, and seems to have taken up the cause very quickly indeed) might think that sending his son to school with a suspicious looking package (these, remember, are Ahmed’s own words) would be a reasonable thing to do, to get the response that he actually got. So, while on the one side there seems to have been an over-reaction (but from where I stand, everything about American police signals over-reaction), on the other side there seems to have been a deliberate intent to take a suspicious looking package to school. And remember, if you leave a suitcase unattended a most airports, the bomb squad will take it away and blow it up in a controlled explosion. There have been a significant number of school shootings, and anyone who knows (as Ahmed’s father must have known) that Muslims carrying suspicious looking packages in this day and age will be challenged, and justly so, suggests that there was some expectation that it would become a cause celebre, that could be used to bolster the Muslim sense of victimisation, which, in fact, is being used to limit people’s freedom to criticise Islam as a religion. After all, would anyone have given a second thought to someone carrying a pressure cooker on a Boston street? Now they would. So, while I think there probably was an over-reaction, there was at least some justification for the it, and making it look entirely innocent seems to be just as much of an over-reaction as the reaction of the school authorities. And the President getting involved in this is way beyond any reasonable response. “Neat clock!” Really? Surely we can balance things out by saying that both points of view show an over-reaction, and the next time a suspicious looking package that really is dangerous is brought into a school by anyone, Muslim or not, there will possibly be a less vigorous, or even no response, and is that outcome altogether desirable? I think there’s over-reaction on both sides of this issue.
Sorry, there are some absolutely meaningless things in my post. I should have previewed it first. As I say, sorry.
Deliberate intent?
The boy and his father wanted to put him at risk? They thought that after the arrest, he would receive positive attention?
This would be funny if it wasn’t so terrible.
I very much doubt that Ahmed and his father were filled with jihadi zeal and implemented a cunning plan. What happened was: a boy found out how prejudiced and uncaring his teachers, school and police are; and his father stood up for him.
Jesus, in a country where black people are shot for not getting out of their cars when ordered to, you really think that boy and his father thought “hey, let’s carry out a bomb hoax” ?
The boy had the clock in his bag. The alarm went off and the teacher asked to see it. He did not plan for this to happen.
Lots of migrants are active in their communities. They experience racism and disadvantage and act to make things better. Sounds like Ahmed’s father wants to protect his son to me.
Eric, to answer a few things:
1) Why house it in a pencil case?
It’s cheap, I’d expect. And you’ll note the display fits rather nicely. This is a pretty obvious thing to do. Yes, you can buy enclosures, if you live somewhere that sells them, or don’t mind paying the shipping for a $10 part or whatever. But, especially if you’ve already got a pencil case (oh, and we’ve one of those here, too), or they’re on for $5 at Staples, why not?
2) Why pull apart a clock and re-house it at all?
It may seem trivial, but tinkerers will do relatively trivial things. Especially a fourteen-year old one. If the clock were broken, either its case cracked or leads broken between boards (both happen), pulling it out of its original housing and putting it back together in a cheap pencil case you might already have is a pretty simple, if unambitious project. Might even do that just to see how it was put together, even if it’s not broken, if it’s an older clock that’s headed for the dump otherwise. (I also periodically pull apart old broken electronics, though more just to see if there’s a few discrete bits I can scavenge for not much trouble; given modern manufacturing, though, you can rarely salvage much more than the odd resistor or capacitor, sometimes the odd old LCD display out of old wireless phones and the like). Sure, it’s not much of a project, and I certainly wouldn’t be encouraging my child to enter it in a science fair or nothin’, but if they were happy how it came out and wanted to show it to their teachers, sure. Baby steps are also good. The sort of cool thing about that clock is the size of the display–big ones like that are relatively rare, though sure, you can still buy one, but it does give a certain neat character. Might have just appealed to him. Big cool display… let’s get it working.
3) Does it mean anything much that he realized it might look suspicious?
I’d say no. A fourteen year old brown Muslim in Texas knows people are generally suspicious of him? Sadly, this is not at all surprising. A geeky kid realizing people really don’t know from their gadgetry? Also not surprising. Every time I pull our rocket gear out I wonder a bit if I’m going to have to be explaining it to someone in a uniform, and I’m quite white (I haven’t, for the record, yet… more often, I have to explain to parents to please keep their more excitable children at least a few feet away from the business end of the things when we’re putting the igniters in).
4) Is it suspicious he called it his ‘invention’?
I don’t know that he modified much, or that he didn’t, or what level of repair might have been involved (doesn’t look from here like much of any). Sure, it’s a bit overstated, but seriously. Fourteen. Tinkerer. So what? Lots of stuff that people do consider science fair grade really isn’t much more than assembling a kit then writing up a discussion poster (sadly). Seems to me this is just a lot of already paranoid people overthinking.
Seriously, this really isn’t that far off the sort of project might happen around my house. My son has put together a few ‘solder it yourself’ kits, and I’ve helped him wire up designs we just found on the net–you learn to solder a bit, that way, some simple mechanical assembly skills,and, if you actually read the accompanying material, maybe some digital logic, so on. Taking apart and reassembling an old gadget (I’m not clear he even soldered the boards back together–may have all just come out in a blob and he screwed them into the pencil case) strikes me as probably a cheaper/probably simpler version of the same thing.
My opinion of CAIR isn’t at all favourable either. But no, even knowing that association, this just doesn’t look at all ‘suspicious’ at all to me. This looks like a garden-variety teenage tinkerer. Had I been there, I would have told anyone at all worried, emphatically: ‘yeah, that’s a clock’, would have offered to play catch with it with Ahmed, were he game. There’s nothing there I don’t recognize, and it would be pretty damned hard to make any bit of it explode. It’s a bit surprising to me the cops didn’t have anyone even of at least that much expertise on hand (especially if the school was calling because they were worried… Seriously, what, they showed to a ‘possible bomb’ call with someone who couldn’t recognize an old Micronta when they saw it?). Again, it wouldn’t earn you much at the science fair, but it certainly shouldn’t earn you handcuffs. Or even anything more than maybe the electrical shop teacher coming over to take a look and confirm for anyone looking at all jittery.
learie, I don’t know, do you? My point is that the boy himself suggested that he had done something to the package so that it would not “look suspicious”. Why would he have done that if he did not know that it could be suspicious looking? And having done it, quite deliberately, why should deliberation be denied? I just think that the reaction on both sides – on the one side to declare his innocence, and on the other to declare his guilt – has been exaggerated. However, from words spoken by the boy himself he seems to have been aware of the suspiciousness of the package, that’s all, and yet he took it anyway, the only difference being that he did not lock the box but tied it up with a piece of string. Let’s not jump off either bridge.
Here we have all the ususal suspects declaring his guilt, and, on the other hand, all the usual suspects declaring him innocent. He was neither, and if it was something deliberate in order to cause a reaction that would tend to confirm people about Muslim victimisation, he’s succeeded admirably. And it is precisely “in a country where black people are shot for not getting out of their cars when ordered to,” and only in such a country, where such a ploy would work, whether that was intentional or not, and the boy’s awareness that it was a suspicious looking package seems to suggest something other than complete innocence at play. In a situation where people are fairly paranoid about what Muslims do (and with some justification), it’s just what someone might foolishly try. In some places kids are used as apparent suicide bombs. Why should a simple stage managed act like this be completely out of the question?
I’m simply not prepared to come down on either side of this. I’m not prepared to say, without knowing a lot more (and we probably will never know), that he was either innocent or guilty, but there are clear reasons to read this story either way.
AJ Milne, our comments crossed. I think what I say still applies. You can read it either way, and I’m not prepared to come down on one side or another. I don’t know what a bomb would look like. Haven’t the slightest idea. It may be what some geek tinkerer would do. It may be what someone trying to attract the attention he got might do too. I say we don’t know enough, except to say that taking the boy away in handcuffs was a bit much, once it seems to have been established that it was only a clock. But declaring that his son had been tortured was a bit over the top as well. Everyone is going off half-cocked here, and I don’t think either one is helpful. How cautious do you think people will be before raising an alarm now, knowing how everyone seems to have lost their marbles because of what an excess of caution achieved? Was it an excess of caution? Given how many people are killed in the US every year by guns or other ordnance, how much caution would you expect teachers to show in concern for the children in their care?
Eric, they knew it wasn’t a bomb. If they’d been all that concerned for “the children in their care” they’d have evacuated the school and called for the bomb squad.
Honestly. Don’t people intending bomb hoaxes claim to have, you know, bombs? The kid said it was a clock, and it turned out to be…a clock.
That’s where he was so cunning, you see.
*snort*
As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
A lot of the time when we phrase things in an either/or manner, it turns out to be a false dichotomy. But in this situation it really isn’t.
Ahmed is either guilty of some kind of crime, or he isn’t. There genuinely is no third option here.
Furthermore, he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Given the case has been closed and Ahmed isn’t to be charged with anything, then he remains innocent by definition.
The reasoning in this is so completely straightforward that it’s a syllogism.
1) For all people, the person in question should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
2) Ahmed Mohammed has not been proven guilty of creating a hoax bomb.
Therefore,
3) Ahmed Mohammed should be presumed innocent of creating a hoax bomb.
So you’re wrong. The answer cannot possibly be ‘neither’. Ahmed is innocent.
Furthermore:
I reassert that Ahmed is to be presumed innocent. However, let us assume for the sake of argument that he is guilty of performing a hoax bomb.
You are essentially granting/arguing that such a ploy could only work because of the culture of fear, bigotry and xenophobia in play in the US right now. Even if we assume Ahmed was taking cynical advantage of this, if you turn around and lay the blame at Ahmed’s feet, then you are performing the very fear, bigotry and xenophobia that enabled the situation in the first place. Even with that assumption, the problem in the scenario isn’t Ahmed’s manipulation of the situation to his own agenda. The problem is the fear, bigotry and xenophobia.
If we then dial back the assumption to the demonstrably correct interpretation that Ahmed is in fact innocent, it gets even worse. Ahmed is not guilty of creating a hoax bomb. But you yourself are demonstrably contributing to the culture of fear, bigotry and xenophobia that led to Ahmed being arrested for no good reason.
Your attempts to poison the well about Ahmed’s character are themselves more deplorable and insidious than anything Ahmed has done. That statement would remain true even if your accusations were correct. Which, for the reasons given above, they are not.
Or is it as cunning as a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on and is now working for the U.N. at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning?
Hmm… That’s cunning.
As a personal anecdote (responding to the original post, not to anyone’s comment), when I was Ahmed’s age (circa 14), I made a retractable ballpoint pen shorter.
Physically, I unscrewed the pen. I shortened the brass shaft of the pen cartridge with an X-Acto razor saw. I shortened one end of the black plastic housing with the saw. I glued the pen back together with Testors plastic model airplane glue (instead of screwing the housing back together, considering I removed one threaded end of the housing). I don’t remember how I got the glue to dry with the housing closed (considering the spring was acting to push the housing apart). I imagine I held it together with my hands for a very long time (circa age 14 I had that kind of time). But by the end of the day, the pen was shorter, and the retractable clicking mechanism worked the way it originally did.
Socially, I took it to school and showed it to a classmate or two.
Why did I make the pen shorter? Because I took the pen apart before, and I saw how the clicking mechanism worked, and I wanted to exercise some mastery over it. Why did I take it to school? Probably the same reason people talk about the weather. But taking it to school wasn’t my goal. Tweaking the pen was just something to do, then something to talk about. I wasn’t trying to get arrested!
@Dave Ricks
So you say. Sounds like a pretty flimsy reason, to me.
What was a fourteen-year-old doing with dangerous objects like X-Acto razors and airplane glue? What motive did your parents have for letting you use such things unsupervised?
You dismembered, mutilated and then reassembled a perfectly serviceable pen, for “something to do”?
And why show it to your friends? You must have known they’d notice something odd about that pen. Were you hoping to alarm them, knowing full well that the situation might, through a series of easily foreseen and perfectly logical steps, lead to fame and fortune for you, fame and fortune far in excess of what you deserved for your meesly efforts with the pen?
A likely story.
Fortunately for the security of right-thinking folk everywhere, if you had been arrested, plenty of people would have found ways to rationalize it.
By the way, all you conspiracy-minded folks?
Ahmed’s father is a Sufi.
Google for “mobile phone detonator”. Every single one of us carrying a mobile phone is clearly on our way to set off a bomb!
Frankly, Eric, characterizing this only as ‘an excess of caution’ seems to me to tell maybe an eighth of the story, and therein lies the problem.
I’ve no problem with school staff who don’t know their technology so well being careful. I’ve brought up science fairs: these have rules about stuff that explodes and other hazards, and they do screen, do check, with good reason. It doesn’t even have to be someone intending ill who hurts someone; poor judgement or poor engineering also pose their hazards. Absolutely, officials should feel free to be careful, and to keep checking, with reasonable escalation, of course.
The trouble is the response from there escalated to absurdity. Not just ‘poor judgement’. Asinine judgement. Really, really, really dumb calls. Winding up with a kid in handcuffs. Over a clock. You’ve said oh, ‘both sides’ are overreacting. I wonder if you appreciate just how this feels to Ahmed and his family, given the context they live in every day.
Yes, in fact, I think there are Muslims and Islamists who try to game people’s reasonable (and laudable) urge to protect the former from very real bigotry to earn somewhat unwarranted and extended protection for their creeds (oh, and I think there’s lots of faiths and movements try to do this, given half a chance, seems to me; it’s just the Muslims are in a particular situation in many communities in the west especially that it gives them some real ammo, there, but see also how the downright cultlike and manipulative Scientologists scream persecution every time someone points out they are, in fact, cultlike and manipulative). But, again, in this situation, the reaction of Ahmed’s family is pretty hard to criticize. Imagining it was somehow ‘playing into their hands’ is like saying right, someone arrested for ‘driving while black’, if they kick up a stink, it was all some plot just to further this narrative that they’re persecuted. Under the circumstances, as pointed out, upthread, they were. It’s pretty stinky to give them trouble for it.
Moving on: the hell of it is: I think the generally paranoid reaction here–and I’m talking here especially about Dawkins and peers chiming in with the paranoid right that oh, somehow this is a bunch of terribly suspicious coincidences (as opposed to their own hyperactive pattern recognition run amuck)–is going to do much damage to the general reputation of anyone who’s been standing anywhere near him–and that includes a lot of us who really, really would like more social latitude for forthright criticism of religions. It really doesn’t help us. The world I dream of is one in which anyone can safely and with social support publish the blunt (and reasonable) opinion that Mohammed didn’t talk to any angel, as there are none of those to talk to, and was really just one more fast talker in a world full enough already of those (and yes, I should like to encourage the same discussion of any self-styled or post-mortem mythologized ‘prophet’ or ‘messiah’). And draw all the comic strips they like to illustrate the notion. The fact that a prominent voice for the forthright criticism of religion now looks this much more like a paranoid loon isn’t going to help this cause. And that is playing into certain folks’ hands, all right, but I really don’t figure Ahmed and family had much of anything to do with it. They were just standing there, as the xenophobia blew up around them. So the fact that Dawkins and friends piped up how they did is beyond stupid. Speaking of runaway reactions.
It is quite reasonable to be appalled at how Ahmed was treated, in short. This thing should just have never got where it did. And Dawkins and co are steadily aggravating an already bad situation.
I once heard a story about a man who deliberately tried to bring a jar of what he claimed was “honey” through airport security, despite knowing that it violated TSA rules. Then, when he was rebuffed and the “honey” confiscated, he had the nerve to complain about it! He was a well-educated man: an Oxford professor, considered a “thought leader” by some, so clearly he wasn’t just making an error in judgment! Why would he do such a thing? Mysterious.
@AJ Milne
Bingo.