Reverse engineering the narrative of Ahmed's clock

Obviously, it's a clock

Instead of saying much myself about what appears to be a very clever passive-aggressive hoax designed to bring sympathy to North Texas Muslims in general and fame and hard cash to the Mohamed family central to the whole thing in particular, I'm just going to put up a series of links that highlight anomalies in the Ahmed narrative either not or under reported elsewhere.

Gina Cassini has put the two main elements together, that the clock was not an invention but rather a reassembly of old clock parts in an aluminum pencil case, a setup that - odd for a clock - concealed the digital clock face. In other words, a jumble of electronic parts in a closed box: of course, "It's a clock".

The other element was the early reaching out for legal aid.

CNN reveals that Ahmed has already scored close to $10,000 out of a goal of $100,000 from his ordeal. If Ahmed makes his goal, a scholarship to MIT will be moot.

Running a story on Sarah Palin, extensive pictures at the British Daily Mail reveal the pre-designed-in Muslim angle to the affair.

Here's a YouTube video of Bill Maher's show including, among others, North Texas billionaire Mark Cuban

Taken together, the entire collection of facts of the case suggest a brilliant passive-aggressive ploy which sucked in as its accelerant everyone from local publisher Wick Allison's lily-white empire to the President of the United States.

Credit in this affair should be extended to both the local high school and police department, who simply did their jobs as detailed and didn't backpedal or otherwise allow themselves to be Ahmed like the rest of the media. Even the the Islamic Association of North Texas, which operates the Mohamed family mosque, put out a statement saying

"We're not pointing a finger at the school district or the police department," Hamideh said. "Under the current climate that exists in this country, you can't really blame them because when they see something like that, they have to react."

So Keith, you now ask, where should I be placing my future wagers?

I'd say

100% that the liberals double down and dig in on this

50%/50% whether or not the Mohamed's try to squeeze some lawsuit money out of the affair

Pretty sure that anything substantial in the way of the offers (Facebook, Twitter, MIT, etc.) will quietly fade away with the news cycle.

100% that we now have a new verb: to be/have been Ahmed.

UPDATE (as they say): 

50%/50% whether the family really wants any more close inspection of Ahmed's clock, or of any other facts of the case for that matter:

Officer James McLellan said Thursday the family is free now to recover the clock that was seized as evidence, but the family has not kept appointments for meetings to do so.
 :
Irving Independent School District Communications Director Lesley Weaver said there is more information, but it cannot be released without a privacy waiver from the family. “All they have to do is sign a release form and we’ll be able to give a different perspective of what happened that day in the classroom and the hours following,” she said.
:
Mohamed family members declined to discuss a privacy waiver. They were still considering possible legal representation over the incident and national television interview requests Thursday.

  
UPDATE 2:

More of the Mohamed Family's Zany Sense of Humor: "Twin Towers Transportation Corp."

Incidentally, I pulled this last link from the site of Rod "#IStandWithAhmed" Dreher, founder of the Benedict Option, my prime candidate for sockpuppet Benny, founder of the now abandoned fake Catholic, pro-Benedict Option newsletter The Benedict Post, and all around beloved Moses who will lead us all into the Benedict Option land of Safe Spaces, but not until the Easter Bunny appears to him in a dream wearing a hijab and pointing the way.

Dear Mr. President and Ahmed

Carly Fiorina will be on the Republican ticket

Or Hillary Clinton will probably be our next President.

In last night's debate, she stood head and shoulders above the rest, dismissing Jake Tapper's gotcha questions out of hand, when asked the feely-tickly-what-kind-of-tree-are-you question what woman she would put on the $10 bill, sneering that such a thing was an empty gesture and that she wouldn't change the currency at all.

And then, of course, this.

The term I would use is Reaganesque. This woman is the real deal.

UPDATE (as they say): The Washington Examiner's post-CNN debate power rankings.

Pick your picture

William Kilpatrick laments the fact that pictures which don't fit the narrative of "standard narrative about peaceful Muslims seeking a better life" are never shown in the media. Excerpt:

The clinching argument for many was the image of a drowned Syrian child which went viral. There should, of course, be no doubt about what to do if you spot a drowning boy in the water or if a hungry person shows up at the door. But the photo tells us absolutely nothing about what sort of immigration policies governments should adopt. It could be argued that if European immigration policy was less liberal and its welfare allowances less generous, fewer people would risk their lives to get there.

And what about the images we don’t see—images of the European victims of ill-considered immigration programs? Right now I’m looking at a photo of an 87-year-old Dutch man lying in a hospital bed, his face beaten black and blue. He and his 86-year-old wife, both of them Holocaust survivors, were attacked in their apartment by two men of Moroccan descent who threw them on the floor, kicked them repeatedly, and shouted: “Dirty Jews—from now on your property is ours.” The husband and wife, who had been living independently, are now confined to wheelchairs at a rehabilitation center.

Leaders in the Catholic Church have got to wake up to the nature of Islam as not just a religion, but as a totalitarian political system. As W. K. ends his article:

One wonders what it will take to remind the Catholic Church of its own centuries-long struggle with Islam. The modern Church was quick to understand the totalitarian nature of communism. Catholic clergy, academics, and journalists were, on the whole, much more astute about the communist menace than their secular counterparts. Yet they have been painfully slow in awakening to the dangers inherent in Islam. Let’s hope that will soon change.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Oh my god, gonads!

These people are so fucked up.

Benny Watch

Rest in peace, Rod Benny. We hardly knew ye.

Still dead.

Rod Dreher Explains His Christian Principles

Appearances matter, politically.

Hmmm, let's see...which way are the winds of public opinion blowing today?

With friends like these [picture of Mike Huckabee], religious liberty needs no enemies

Now, let's keep in mind Rod Dreher is a blogger, pundit, memoirist, ::coughanonymouscatholicfifthcolumnistcough:: and, most recently, to help ends meet, a ghost writer, while frenemy of religious liberty Mike Huckabee is a magna cum laude college graduate, Baptist minister, former Governor of Arkansas, and former and current presidential candidate.

So clearly Huckabee's qualifications to speak on religious liberty and politics are not at all on a par with Rod's.

What I’m trying to get you to understand is how the Kim Davis thing looks to many people who don’t live inside your bubble. Appearances matter, politically.

Appearances also matter desperately if one is trying to beat the bushes to drum up support for one's signature Benedict Option, a proposition rooted ultimately in Christian hopelessness and despair about the world we live in.

A county clerk fighting back against a Supreme Court decision, even futilely, a social conservative running for the Presidency unapologetically as a social conservative - these things are like garlic to a vampire with respect to any sort of immediacy needed to drive interest in a book about your last, only Benedict Option.

As long as other Christians are taking a stand, any drehery Benedict Option dhimmitude is always something one can think about mañana.

Well, clearly mañana won't put any Benedict Option book wine and oysters into our ghost writer's belly any time soon, so just as clearly any blade of resistant grass that dares raise its head on the barren plains of Benedict Option despair can dependably count on being immediately Millmaned as thoroughly as possible.

Because, you know, appearances matter, politically.

"Why so many Catholic laypeople are thinking about some form of the Benedict Option"

Really? How many? Rod Dreher doesn't say, nor does he need to, because "so many" means exactly the same thing as "Benedict Option" - anything and nothing. However many "so many" may be, Rod desperately needs every last one of them he can make you believe exists if he is to give his Benedict Option book proposal marketing angle any sort of meaningful religious grounding.

What may help that "so many" become a few more, though, is Rod Dreher's sock puppet blog The Benedict Post, designed to woo Catholics to his Benedict Option by posing it as a weekly staple of Catholic thinking. Benny, as I like to call Rod's Catholic-fishing alter-ego, has had some publishing gaps over the last several weeks because Rod has been preoccupied with the death of his father. Our condolences on their loss. I'm confident Benny will be back up and chirping out Dreher-pitch-perfect Benedict Option Catholicisms any day now.

Benny

With Jake Meador on his team, dutifully referring to Rod's Benedict Option by its inventor's preferred trade mark, the shibboleth "BenOp" (because, for a Christian concerned with thickening his religious faith, those full five syllables can be a burden far too heavy and distracting; and, of course, because Twitter) and with Rod invited to retreat with Evangelicals to make his pitch directly, so far Benny doesn't have a little Protestant sock puppet blogging brother.

The rebrand that "everybody" is talking about.

But stay tuned. It's still early in the campaign season, and a Protestant Benny may still pop up. Or, less likely, I may be proved wrong about Benny, an option statistically as likely as Rod posting a picture of Francis that just once invokes the Vicar of Christ instead of a sixth Marx brother.