‘Hysteria migrating’ across United States
The case of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Muslim boy who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school shows a degree of hysteria and a lack of common sense, even among US public school teachers, says Derek Monroe, independent writer and journalist.
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim boy, was handcuffed and arrested for bringing a home-made clock to school in Irving, Texas. The teenager says he hoped to impress his teacher with his invention.
RT: A Muslim boy brings a clock he made to school and gets arrested. Were you shocked to see him arrested?
Derek Monroe: I think if you look at hysteria and the current degree of political mudslinging, specifically at minorities you’ll see something like this coming. Although, you would think that people who are teaching in American public schools would have some kind of degree of common sense and apparently it’s not so. So you can see a lot of the hysteria is kind of migrating to different elements of our society.
READ MORE: 'Looks like a bomb': Muslim teen Ahmed arrested for bringing homemade clock to school
RT:Why have politicians like Obama and Clinton rushed to tweet their support?
DM: Once again, we are in the middle of the political election cycle. Therefore, a lot of people try to use it basically for creating some kind of degree of friendliness, as well as political correctness into a variety of different forms. However, it doesn’t change the fact of the situation that the population is very much scared of a variety of different issues. Possibly our students who are representing some type of degree of different minority… are being basically taken for something completely different, which is very tragic what happened to Ahmed. But it is also pretty farcical, to say the least.
RT:What needs to be done to change attitudes towards Muslims and other minorities?
DM: I think education and also information about different cultures. For example a few days ago we had a hate crime attack on a sick person here in a suburb of Chicago, where a 17-year-old teenager attacked somebody who was driving a car who happened to be a Sikh. Basically not only education but also I would say awareness of other societal issues, as well as simple humanity – what is really missing here. Every person from every kind of creed, religion or color is a human being first and foremost, and people should be judged by their actions, not by the color of their skin.
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