Source: BBC
A Texas college student wanted to show her support for Ahmed Mohamed. Twenty-four hours later, her hashtag has started a movement.
More than 700,000 people have taken to Twitter to support Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old student who was arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school that was mistaken for a bomb.
Ahmed brought the clock into MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, to show his engineering teacher. After another teacher saw it, police were summoned and Ahmed was interrogated, handcuffed and placed in juvenile detention.
No charges were filed. The police later acknowledgement that Ahmed’s work was not dangerous. Those on social media who feel that the event was unjust and racially motivated have used #IStandWithAhmed to show their support.
The hashtag was created by Amneh Jafari, who wrote, “If his name was John he would be labelled as a genius. Since its Ahmed he’s labelled as a “suspect”. #doublestandards #IStandWithAhmed.”
Jafari, a 23-year-old psychology student at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), was shocked that such a young student was arrested in her state.
She told BBC Trending that as the oldest of nine children, with two siblings around Ahmed’s age, “it was so close to home.”
Categories: Americas, Islamophobia
No body would have credited ‘John’ with something he never invented. Many children put things together and do not make noise about it.
Ahmed said that he had to put the wires the way he did because he did not want his contraption to look suspicious? Why did the idea that it could look suspicious ever cross his mind?
If ‘John’ did anything that looked ‘suspicious’ he would have been treated in much the same way with nobody batting an eyelid.