The family of the 14-year-old Muslim student who got in trouble over a homemade clock mistaken for a possible bomb withdrew the boy Monday from his suburban Dallas high school.
Ahmed Mohamed's father, Mohamed El-Hassan Mohamed, said he has pulled all of his children from their schools. Mohamed said the family is still deciding where to send the children to school.
Ahmed has said he brought the clock he made to MacArthur High School in Irving last week to show a teacher. Officials say he was arrested after another teacher saw it and became concerned. Ahmed wasn't charged, but he was suspended from school for three days.
"Ahmed said, 'I don't want to go to MacArthur,'" Ahmed's father told The Dallas Morning News "These kids aren't going to be happy there."
News of the arrest sparked an outpouring of support for Ahmed, including from President Barack Obama.
Numerous schools have offered to enroll Ahmed, his father said. But Mohamed said he wants to give his son a breather before making a decision. He said his entire family plans to fly to New York on Wednesday, where United Nations dignitaries want to meet his son. Then, if the appropriate visas can be obtained, Mohamed wants to take his son on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
"I ask Allah to bless this time. After that, we'll see," Mohamed said.
When they return, a visit to the White House and a meeting with Obama is in the works, he said.
Meanwhile according to an engineer’s blog post on Artvoice, Ahmed didn’t actually make a digital clock. He took apart an existing clock from the 1970s and simply transplanted its guts into the pencil case he picked up off Amazon.
He said:
I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)
For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics.
So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756.
Wonder if President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft and others will rescind their invites and take back their gifts if this is true.
