Ahmed Mohamed, Stands Up To Racial and Religious Profiling

I was going to post a boring blog entry today dealing with one of the constitutional amendments that the Republicans wanted to get rid of but something else came up on the news which I think is much much more important then what I was going to write about.

Yesterday, a 14 year old ninth grade student was arrested for being a terrorist. This young man, Ahmed Mohammad, build a homemade clock and brought it to school to impress his teacher. Instead of congratulating the young man, he was told to put the clock back in his backpack.

Later, the alarm went off on his clock and his English teacher became suspicious and she informed the principal and the next thing you know the young man is being arrested by the police for being a terrorist! He is led off and handcuffs and taken to the police department where he was interrogated for  over 5 hours with no attorney present. I don't know if he received his Miranda rights or not but he was questioned with no attorney and I wouldn't be surprised if he was questioned without his parents being present as well.

Mind you Ahmed is a Muslim. He's tall, skinny, wears glasses, look kind of  nerdy  with brown skin. If he was white, he would look just like any other nerdy kid in school. I know because I used to be one of those nerdy kids. In fact he reminds me of me in many ways except I'm white and Ahmed is not.

Finally after a 5-hour interrogation, the police decided not to file any charges. However the school suspended him for three days I believe. Ahmed said that he never wants to go back to that school and fortunately his parents agree with him. I wouldn't want to go back to that school either.

I ask you this, if I said Mohamed was white and Christian, would he have been treated the same way? I definitely don't believe he would have been. We have a huge huge problem with discrimination and racism in our country and it must end. I know there's a lot of  prejudice against Muslims mostly due to 911. We need to step back and look at the big picture. Is this the proper and right way to treat another person? Did we learn anything from World War II ?

Fortunately, there are some positive things to this story. It looks like Ahmed will not be going back to his old school. In fact he received numerous  scholarship offers  so he can pretty much attend any school that he wants to.
Mark Zuckerberg has invited him to visit Facebook and the President has invited Ahmed to bring his  clock and himself to the White House. Now that's pretty impressive if you want my opinion. So it looks like Ahmed Mohamed is going to have a happy ending to his story and that's good for him and for the United States .

What we need to do is address these problems on a national level. What can we do to eliminate this type of stereotyping and racial profiling that appears to be going on and pretty much every community in the United States? Is every American suffering  from PTSD? I don't think so. 911 was a terrible crime against the U.S. but we need to get over our hatred for others it will be our undoing.

That's what happened  in Germany between World War I and World War II. The Nazis were able to cause division within their own country by singling groups out and getting these individual groups to hate each other because it was easier to control smaller groups rather than a population of the whole. That's pretty much how the Nazis took over the minds of the population was by little groups at a time. This is something that cannot happen in our country because our country is so diverse. We have many different religions. We have many many different ethnic groups and when we are unified we are strong, we are powerful, but when we are divided we are weak. Remember the words of Abraham Lincoln,  "A house divided against itself can not stand."