US President Barack Obama has
issued a White House invitation to a Muslim schoolboy who was arrested for
bringing a homemade clock to school.
Ninth-grade high school student
Ahmed Mohamed from Irving, Texas, was arrested on Monday after his teachers
reported him to the police for making a clock, which they said resembled a
bomb.
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| The Clock |
The arrest prompted outrage with
thousands expressing their anger at authorities for arresting a 14-year-old boy
over his school project.Social media users rallied behind
the teen using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, which has picked up more than
500,000 mentions on Twitter so far, according to analytics site Topsy, and
continues to rise rapidly.
Police have said they will not
charge Mohamed but he told reporters on Wednesday that he remains suspended
from school until Thursday.
Many of the comments cited
Mohamed's religious and ethnic background as the probable cause of his arrest,
a viewpoint shared by the largest Muslim civil advocacy group in the US.Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for
the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera that it was
"obvious" the school boy's religion had played a role in his arrest.
"We believe the arrest would
not have occurred if the student had not been Muslim ... the school's reaction
and that of the police stems from the fact that he is a Muslim," Hooper
said.
"It is a symptom of growing
Islamophobia that a 14-year-old was handcuffed and dragged away for doing a
science project."
Obama's open invitation
Google has invited Mohamed to a science fair, and asking him to
bring his clock
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