Wednesday, September 23, 2015

One of the Prices of Bigoted Demagoguery

Professional Islamophobe Pam Geller brings her trademark (lack of) insight to the Ahmed Mohamed incident, the boy who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school:

"If you ever see a Muslim with a suspicious object, remember the lesson of Ahmed Mohamed: to say something would be 'racism,'" she wrote. "That could end up being the epitaph of America and the free world."

A rational mind might observe that the biggest difference between a homemade clock and a homemade bomb is that the latter involves explosives. Without actual explosives, you have no bomb. Without make-believe explosives, you have no make-believe bomb. But more than that, the reason why the boy's clock looks like a bomb to people like Geller, and the reason any circuit board is going to look like a bomb to the equally addle Frank Gaffney, is because by all appearances everything they know about electronics and bomb-making comes from watching movies.

If we're going to embrace hysterics and suggest that any person in possession of something that looks like it could be used as a trigger device for a bomb should be arrested, whether or not they possess real, fake or imaginary explosives, we can start by arresting any person found in possession of a cellular phone. Meanwhile, if Geller is truly concerned that arresting kids for possessing homemade clocks is going to prevent the arrest of actual criminals, I suggest that she get herself a copy of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", read it, then take a long look at herself in the mirror.

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