Goes something like:

Dad is an activist
Sister was suspended for threatening to blow up the school previously
Mayor and town known for islamaphobia
Dad puts kid up to it
Kid takes radio shack clock and puts the guts in a box (aka he didn't make it)
They knew folks would 'overreact'
Now they get to sue and be rich

Goddamit I just type a big thing on this then my phone wiped it out. Anyway the kid was pretty uncooperative with the English teacher and with the cops. What kind of science tinkerer doesn't want to talk about his experiment? He just kept saying "it's a clock" and "it looks like a clock to me". It beggars belief that the kid wasn't at least aware it might look like a bomb,

I asked about this itt when it first came out, long before I ever read anything on CP:

Anyway there's more stuff like the kid is in something of an activist family (nothing wrong with that but it certainly could have been a motivating factor). The daughter got kicked out of school for wearing a hijab or something. The family is now suing for emotional damages despite seeming pretty thrilled with all the national attention. The kid has some quote like "I never thought it would go this far." Kid has no real history as any kind of science nerd or tinkerer.

I'm just saying if I had to bet - I'd bet the kid had a clue he'd get in trouble for this, and was looking to provoke something, he had no idea it would go national obviously.

I could be very wrong.

short of a legit facebook post from the dad saying "i've taught my kid to reassemble a clock so as to trick the white man into giving us free college tuition," I don't see any way this could be viewed as suzzer is claiming.

Again, I posted a kid trying to get attention who was caught lying. Like, dead to rights. No "well maybe this means" nonsense necessary.

so maybe he hasn't seen enough 24 to know what white america thinks an islamic bomb looks like?

or maybe he was so dumbfounded that people thought his clock was a bomb that all he could do, finding himself in trouble for bringing a science project to school, was try to drill in the fact that it was, in fact, a clock?

Nah, more likely he's playing the media for fame and money.

Look, they even staged his room to make it look like he's sort of a tinkerer, but we all know there'd be more wires and boards about.

Wow look how many people have a strong opinion itt despite not even being aware of the basic argument from the other side. :/

Anyway I don't know about the whole sue for lots of money theory. But we know the family was probably pissed at the school, and it just seems unlikely to me the kid didn't have some idea he was going to provoke a reaction.

They were just gonna sue for a little bit of money?

recognizing that argument is stupid doesn't mean people aren't aware of it

Obviously the right wing media has a huge incentive to justify the Islamophobia.

But even if the people who were wrong about Trayvon Martin's industrial lean manufacturing operation and the multiple layers of Obama's birth certificate are right that it's a commercial clock, the most likely explanation is that he was trying to impress his teacher rather than run some weird con. But even if he did: good for him. Exposing Islamophobia and stupidity at schools and in the police department is actually more important than adolescent clock manufacture.

Nice touch with the NASA shirt too.

@Suzzer,

Who knows? But...

Kid not wanting to talk about his clock to the cops doesn't seem weird. Not wanting to make too big a deal over it, especially if he overstated his work ie took the guts out of a radio shack clock, also not a big deal.

Sister getting in trouble for wearing hijab? Also not incriminating imo.

There are definitely people trying to make this kid look bad, so I wouldn't trust reports like "he had no history of tinkering." Who knows that? Did he say it? I have built a couple little electronics things, but I'm pretty sure no one else on earth took notice of me doing it.

I know you're not saying anything other than MAYBE, but I'd bet the NOT side unless something specific about there being a plan comes out.

Also, from Wiki:

Rebuilding a clock is a legit project, right? You can learn things from this I'm thinking.

And if that was the plan, how incredibly incredibly wacko would it be to send your kid to school with a fake bomb? That's like, totally ridiculously massively insane. Not impossible, sure, but really it would be hard for that to be consistent with having an otherwise normal life.

Hijabs do kind of resemble bombs.

#HeWasNoScienceNerd

Well, I didn't know about the sister, and that adds to the theory I guess, but to me this whole thing seems entirely predictable as a misunderstanding between a freaked out school and a young bookish boy. I mean, how long now have we been having school shootings and bombings by crazy kids mad at being dorks that everyone picks on? How long have we had islamists threatening to destroy the infidels and sometimes following through? That puts schools on high alert already and ripe for a kid to get himself arrested for something like this. Was it an example of Islamophobia, almost certainly. Was it innevitable to happen at some point? I think so.

Neither here nor there, but imo in the preceding 10 seconds he yelled at his little sister to get out of the picture and leave his stuff alone.

suzzer, the big hole in your theory here is that, before this happened, the expectation that bringing a clock to school would have resulted in all this wouldn't be there. If your totally nutty conspiracy theory was right and the dad put him up to it hoping for police to get involved, then he picked some pretty awful bait and got lucky at how stupid the school officials actually are. It's super results oriented to suggest that this was a foreseeable consequence of bringing a damn clock to school.

But I guess it's just because I'm not an independent thinker like you that I must think that.

If you can predict that everyone who doesn't post on Chiefsplanet will think a new view of yours is proof that you are a racist idiot, not posting it is a great start, but you should also consider not believing it at all, shouldn't you?

I mean, let's be real here. We all know you're not going to come out with proof that this clock was actually a bomb, or that the kid intentionally used it as a prop in a hoax that a reasonable person would interpret as a true threat. It's definitely going to be an argument that the kid is actually a Race Hustler/Outside Agitator/No Angel. You're smart enough and cultured enough not to use those terms (and definitely not the term "good Muslim"), but the guy on CP who sourced this theory and who is always calling Obama a monkey (not as a racial thing, you understand, just as a general term of abuse) probably will. But before we get all bogged down in the political philosophy and bona fides of this 14-year-old kid, why does it matter? What "things" does it change? You seem to concede that the police had no cause to arrest him. Does it matter whether the police arrested him because he was a brown kid in possession of circuitry or whether it was because he had some political agenda? There are rules here. The police clearly violated them, and this kid is a victim of that violation. As far as I can tell, you don't even disagree with any of that. It almost makes the story worse if some kid was able to bamboozle the entire school disciplinary and criminal justice apparatus into victimizing him on cue just by carrying around a reassembled clock.

Seems almost impossible that this is the case, but of course it matters (not the whole wide world of sports, but in whatever happened to him) if he was trying to make people think he brought a bomb to school.

Not going to review to see if people were overly mean to Suzzer, but I think the point remains:

Suzzer, even assuming THE WORST about the kid, his dad, and Muslims, what do we have here? That these uppity SJW Muslims prove you CAN provoke the authorities into hysterically arresting children for building electronics that look like bombs?

You're not going to like the analogy but like the Civil Rights Era saw tons of actual agitators purposefully aggravating racist white southerners into shameful overreactions. I find really no compelling reason to believe the kid and his family concocoted a scheme into making the town look like a bunch of retrograde Islamophobes but I mean, if they did, mission accomplished, right?

It's that horrible pop psychology argument. We don't have any good idea how he is likely to react. The range of responses is far too wide and dependent on his other dispositions, history and the attitude of those asking the questions as well as the facts of the case.

The response adds pretty much nothing but we do have to resist our cognitive biases which tend to make us see it as confirming what we already thought because it is consistent with what we already thought.

You mean like people sitting at the whites only lunch counter is what you're comparing to the entirely hypothetical Muslim kid bringing a fake bomb to school?

I knew you'd say that.

school bombings?

havent heard of any, makes it seem like you're trying to conflate the many school shooters with OMG WHO KNOWS MAYBE IT WAS A LEGIT BOMB AHMED!

Yes, you seem to understand, with the caveat that you going right to 'it's a fake bomb' is the whole point of why this is discriminatory: anyone else brings some dumb circuits hooked together, no one imagines it's a fake bomb. Muslims do it and it's clear they've needlessly incited fear and anxiety.

If you're sort of like, oh, well DVaut1, you're conceding they're activists, and surely they have to be self-aware to know they are Muslims and how the nice white people of their town will interpret Muslims carrying around a mess of wires in a box, so they just had to know what a bad and upsetting idea that is: welcome to racist town, population: you.

That you're all like "blacks sitting at a counter is NOTHING like the stress induced by Muslims carrying wires around in a box" then I think you might want to think a little deeper on what is underlying and implicit to your argument.