The absurd saga of Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohamed continues: Ahmed’s father, who brought the family back to the Dallas suburbs for the summer, just made good on his previous threat of a $15 million lawsuit.
On Monday, his father’s lawyer filed a civil rights claim against the boy’s old school MacArthur High, the school principal and the town of Irving, Texas—claiming a history of racial and religious discrimination and violation of Ahmed’s privacy and equal protection. But rather than underprice Ahmed’s distress, the complaint does not specify a sum.
It’s been nearly a year since Sudanese Muslim-American, then-fourteen-year-old Ahmed left his high school in handcuffs. A jumble of clock-radio innards he showed off as a “homemade clock” looked too much like a hoax bomb, and the zero-tolerance disciplinary response, combined with Ahmed’s father’s appetite for publicity and the clicking public’s appetite for knee-jerk P.C. posturing, rocketed an otherwise ordinary if quirky kid to viral fame, which President Obama’s infamous “Cool clock, Ahmed” significantly stoked.
Last October, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Lee Smith wrote:
Ahmed didn’t like Qatar (“Not many kids play outside,” he said), and Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who twice sought the Sudanese presidency, was ready to reclaim the spotlight stateside. Last year, according to the Washington Post, “[T]hey put Ahmed on ‘Good Morning America,’ MSNBC and ‘The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.’ He told reporters how kids in school called him ISIS Boy. Sympathetic crowdfunders raised $18,000 for his education. He visited the White House, the Google Science Fair and the president of his home country of Sudan (a wanted war criminal, but Mohamed said it would be rude not to accept the invitation).” And last month, Mohamed invited reporters to document Ahmed’s return to Texas. Mohamed’s eagerness to capitalize on the episode suggests a type of long con we’re well accustomed to in this country—a political campaign.
