(ANTIMEDIA) “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” That is what President Obama tweeted in support of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim- American 9th-grader who was arrested and threatened with charges for bringing a homemade clock for show-and-tell, because idiocrat school officials and cops thought, “It looks like a movie bomb to me.”
Ahmed, who has become a viral sympathetic cause célèbre, has since confirmed in a press conference that he will indeed be visiting the White House.
For his supporters, this is a reappearance of the Obama they fell in love with: an American president who Muslims around the world can view not as an imperialist persecutor, but as a champion for tolerance, civil rights, and democracy.
Obama similarly angled for sensitivity points after the killing of a black teenager when he mused that “Trayvon Martin could have been my son.”
Both gestures are grotesque coming from the man who presides over both the War on Drugs — which every year incarcerates or kills countless young blacks — and the War on Terror, which every year kills or incarcerates countless young Muslims. Indeed, one has to wonder if when they do meet, Obama will similarly muse, “Ahmed Mohamed could have been my bugsplat.”
“Bugsplat” is the term used by UAV operators to describe the way their screens look when they remotely obliterate human beings from the sky in Obama’s multiple drone wars. One particular human being Obama turned to bugsplat was 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki, who, like 14-year-old Ahmed, was a skinny Muslim-American high school kid in glasses.
Abdulrahman’s father was an extremist cleric who spoke in support of terrorism, although the Obama administration never proved its allegation that he played an operational role. But Abdulrahman himself had absolutely zero ties to terrorism, and zero indication that he even endorsed it. He was just a kid who feared for his targeted father’s life and who travelled to Yemen to look for him.
Two weeks after his father (also an American citizen) was assassinated by drone, Abdulrahman was set to head back home to his suburban life as a regular American high schooler. He was having a goodbye dinner with his teenage cousin, eating in a restaurant’s outdoor dining area, when they were both killed — along with at least five other civilians — by a C.I.A. drone strike.
When a reporter asked Robert Gibbs how the administration justified the extrajudicial killing of an underage American citizen, the top Obama adviser coldly answered that the boy should have had a “more responsible father.” Obama himself probably isn’t too distraught over it either, judging from his willingness to crack jokes about killing teen boys with drones. At the White House Correspondent’s dinner, the year before he killed Abdulrahman, he delivered this bit:
“The Jonas Brothers are here; they’re out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.”
Abdulrahman surely never saw it coming either, and neither would have Ahmed in different, but still entirely innocent circumstances.
With his show of support for Ahmed, Obama is posturing as a friend of innocent Muslims while simultaneously racking up innocent Muslim deaths as “collateral damage” every day. He has bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries in his presidency so far.
And he is posturing as a fighter against anti-Muslim prejudice while waging lethally prejudicial drone wars in several Muslim countries.
Consider Obama’s method for counting civilian casualties that counts all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants”; his “signature strike” practice of drone-killing unidentified individuals based on their location and behavior visuals alone; and his “double tap” practice of drone-bombing anyone who tries to come to the aid of victims of a previous strike. As Spencer Ackerman reported for The Guardian in 2014:
“A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals — the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls ‘targeted killing’ — they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.”
Obama routinely assassinates people based on mere proximity, location, and suspicious movements: talk about prejudice! The U.S. president is the deadliest one-man “pre-judge,” jury, and executioner of Muslims on the planet. His supportive tweet and White House invitation to Ahmed only confirms him as also one of the world’s biggest hypocrites.
Ahmed, who by all indications is an incredibly sweet, sincere, and thoughtful kid, said he wants to use his newfound fame “to help every other kid in the entire world that has a problem like this.”
Hopefully before his White House visit, if he hasn’t already, Ahmed will learn about one such kid; a kid in many ways like him; a kid who was terminated with extreme prejudice by his manipulative, grinning host.
And hopefully, he will bravely do as his fellow Muslim teen, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai did on her White House visit, and challenge Obama on his drone wars to his face. Ahmed, ask the “anti-prejudice” president if young Abdulrahman deserved to die simply because of who his family was.
This article (Here’s What the Clock-Making Kid Should Ask Obama at the White House) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dan Sanchez and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.
Dan Sanchez began contributing articles to Anti-Media in August of 2015. His topics of interest include anti-imperialism, economic education, libertarian philosophy, peaceful parenting, and police accountability. He currently resides in Auburn, Alabama.
