If you’ve been living in a cave the last few days, then you probably haven’t heard about Ahmed Mohamed and his bomb lookalike clock. Some call him the Muslim hero America has been waiting for. Some call him the biggest scammer in the history of America. Nevertheless, #IStandWithAhmed has been the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter.

For a moment, President Obama must have been stumped because all this while he thought he was (and only) the Muslim hero America has ever had. He invited Ahmed to the White House anyway, probably thinking he could ride on Ahmed’s popularity and win another Nobel Peace Prize, never mind the Nobel Committee has asked the president “nicely” to return the medal he got in 2009.

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

Assumptions and fear don’t keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building. http://t.co/ywrlHUw3g1 — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 16, 2015

Hi @IStandWithAhmed, we ? building things at @twitter too. Would you consider interning with us? We’d love it — DM us! #IStandWithAhmed

— Twitter (@twitter) September 16, 2015

So, what’s up with the Ahmed’s fiasco so much so that the White House, amazingly, extended the 14-year-old Ahmed an invitation to speak with NASA scientists and astronauts at next month’s Astronomy Night? Long story short, he brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock.

School officials, suspected it was a bomb because it freaking looked like a bomb, hauled him out of class. Ahmed Mohamed, whose parents are from Sudan, was arrested, handcuffed and questioned by five police officers at MacArthur high school in Irvine, Texas. Subsequently, he was suspended for three days, and all hell breaks loose.

The police was accused of being overreacted although the device did look something Tom Cruise would not think twice about throwing out of a speeding bullet train in his “Mission Impossible” films. The student claims he was not allowed to call his parents and was accused of carrying a hoax bomb. “I felt like I was a criminal, I felt like I was a terrorist. I felt like all the names I was called.” – Ahmed claimed.

Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose rating is dropping like a rock, wasted no time throwing her support behind Ahmed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also joined the social media chorus, extending an open invitation to visit and encouraging Ahmed to “keep building.” Tech giants MIT, Twitter and Google are fighting tooth and nail to recruit him.

Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, said he believed the incident was racially-motivated. But Mohamed is a politician himself who ran twice but failed for president of Sudan. And he’ll run again this year (2015) on a National Reform Party ticket. He refers himself as a sheikh but surprisingly, Muslim leaders in Texas doubted his claims to religious and scholarly leadership.

Now, revolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has questioned whether the boy had truly “invented” the clock, as has been reported. The emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, linked to a YouTube video entitled “Ahmed Mohammed Clock is a FRAUD”; in which user Thomas Talbot alleges Mohamed’s clock “is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing”.

Dawkins continued – “If this is true, what was his motive? Whether or not he wanted the police to arrest him, they shouldn’t have done so … This man seems to know what he’s talking about … Assembling clock from bought components is fine. Taking clock out of its case to make it look as if he built it is not fine. Which is true?”

Another politician, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, isn’t impressed at all. She slams President Obama’s practice of jumping in cases prematurely to interject himself as the cool saviour, wanting so badly to attach himself to the issue-of-the-day. Amusingly, Sarah insulted Obama –  “Right. That’s a clock, and I’m the Queen of England.”

Anthony DiPasquale, the webmaster for Artvoice.com, has also exposed the circuitry behind Ahmed’s clock.  Initially impressed, the electronics geek concludes that Ahmed’s homemade gadget is actually a factory-produced clock. “Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax … Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock.”

In one interview, Ahmed says he closed the pencil case with a cord so it wouldn’t look “suspicious” in school. But why should he give a damn about suspicious looking parts if his intention was truly showing off a hobby project to his teachers? Clearly, if the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that’s creative otherwise it is nothing but a hoax.

But where’s the proof that Ahmed didn’t invent nor build a clock? Anthony pointed that Ahmed’s device is actually a 1980s digital alarm clock sold by Radio Shack. It was built by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidiary with catalogue number 63-765A, and you can buy it on eBay here for US$29.95. As for Ahmed’s vaultz locking pencil box, you can get it too at Amazon for US$12.75.

So, was the whole fiasco a deliberate plan by Ahmed’s own father, an ambitious politician nonetheless, to provoke suspicion and to catapult his name politically, knowing very well he could capitalise on Muslim apologist Obama? Did he also know that even if police will not investigate the “clock” as an explosive device, eventually it will still be regarded as a “hoax bomb” hence the publicity?

If the whole fiasco was a setup from the beginning, one has to admit it’s a brilliant idea. Not bad for a hoax which cost less than US$50 and in returns getting a White House invitation, offers from Facebook, Twitter, MIT, Google, NASA and more than US$15,000 for an academic scholarship. And there’s a crowd funding by LaunchGood to raise US$100,000 for Ahmed.

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