Loading ...Father of ‘clock kid’ Ahmed Mohamed sues Glenn Beck, Fox and others for defamation
The Muslim boy who found himself in the national spotlight after he was wrongfully arrested for bringing a homemade alarm clock to school is now at the center of a lawsuit accusing conservative media companies and personalities of defaming the teen and his family.
According to the defamation lawsuit, the defendants aired and made false statements on national television, accusing Ahmed Mohamed and his family of being terrorists or “jihadists.” The 21-page complaint alleges that the defendants misled the public and, in doing so, fanned “the flames of fear and anger toward Muslims and immigrants.”
The lawsuit was filed last week in Dallas County, Tex., by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Mohamed, who fled Sudan to avoid religious persecution. The defendants are: TheBlaze Inc. and its founder, Glenn Beck; Fox Television Stations, LLC; the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank, and its executive vice president, Jim Hanson; television and radio personalities Ben Ferguson and Ben Shapiro; and Beth Van Duyne, the mayor of Irving, Tex., where the Mohameds lived.
“The broadcasts aired by Fox and the Blaze are the very definition of ‘yellow journalism,’” the complaint says. “To broadcast inaccurate, biases and sensationalized falsehoods in the guise of ‘news’ is an offense, not just to the victims of the defamatory statements, but to the public.”
The statements that the lawsuit claims were libelous were made shortly after Ahmed was arrested and interrogated by Irving police in September 2015.
The complaint says that Ahmed, who was 13 at that time, had developed a love for robotics and was known for creating elaborate contraptions and bringing them to school to please his teachers. One day, he brought an alarm clock he created out of old batteries, a pencil box he had when he was in middle school and other gadgets he found in his family’s garage, and showed it to his geometry teacher at MacArthur High School.
Robots and drones could keep an eye out for oil workers.
The teacher thought the device was a bomb, and took the alarm clock from Ahmed, telling him she would hold it for him for the rest of the day, according to the complaint.
Several hours later, police officers showed up at the school.
Ahmed was pulled out of his chair during class, handcuffed and escorted out of the school, according to the complaint. He was brought to the police station, where his mug shots and fingerprints were taken.
During a 1 1/2 hour-long interrogation, Ahmed repeatedly told officers that he brought an alarm clock to school, not a bomb, the complaint says. Despite repeated pleas to talk to his parents, he was told he couldn’t.
The Irving police chief later admitted that the arrest was a mistake. The charge — possession of a hoax bomb — was dropped.
According to an internal police department email obtained through a public records request, one of the officers said that “that thing doesn’t even look like a bomb,” the complaint says.
Still, Ahmed was disciplined and suspended for three days for code of conduct violation and possession of prohibited items. The incident has since prompted the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division to investigate the Irving Independent School District. That investigation remains pending.
[‘They thought it was a bomb’: 9th-grader arrested after bringing a home-built clock to school]
The incident turned the 13-year-old boy into a viral sensation and earned him the nickname “Clock Boy” or “Clock Kid.”
That same month, TheBlaze aired a show in which Beck, who is the host, and guests Hanson and Van Duyne, the Irving mayor, discussed Ahmed’s arrest.
“My theory is that for some reason Irving is important to the Islamists, not the Muslims, but the Islamists. It could be as simple as the progressives trying to turn Texas blue, and this is just the place where they’re just going to start planting the seeds and taking a stand,” Beck said on the show.
Van Duyne said on the show that Ahmed was not forthcoming to police and school officials about what he’d brought to school, and that his family didn’t respond to requests for records from the city. The lawsuit claims that wasn’t true.
In response to Beck, Hanson said that Ahmed’s arrest was a publicity stunt by terrorists, and that someone persuaded the boy to bring the device to school.
“They wanted people to react, and they wanted to portray this kid as an innocent victim,” Hanson said. “I think he was a pawn potentially by his father.”
Over the next two months, Shapiro and Ferguson made similar statements on Fox News and Fox 4 News, respectively.
“I think he used his son. He is one of those, you know, ‘I’m gonna point out anyone that’s against Islam type of guy. I’m going to cause problems.’ They preplanned this. It looked like a bomb. He also didn’t create a clock. He took a clock apart and he put it in a mini-briefcase to make it look like a bomb,” said Ferguson, who also said that Ahmed loved his newfound fame and compared him to the Kardashians.
[Family of ‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Mohamed files lawsuit against former school]
Fox and Shapiro declined to comment, citing a pending litigation.
In an email response to The Washington Post, Hanson, of the Center for Security Policy, repeated statements he’d made about Ahmed’s father, saying he’s using his son “as a pawn in a political game.”
“This lawsuit is just another example of that and worse an attempt to silence the truth tellers who expose the Islamist agenda,” Hanson said. “They will not silence us and we hope that others who may fear to speak up will be heartened when he prevail, and we will.”
The center’s general counsel, David Yerushalmi, called the lawsuit “frivolous,” an example of “malicious prosecution” and “Islamist lawfare.”
Beck, Van Duyne and Ferguson did not respond to inquiries from The Post.
Mohamed’s lawyers also did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit demands that the defendants publicly retract statements they’d made about Ahmed’s arrest.
Ahmed’s family also recently filed a civil rights lawsuit against his former Texas school district, the principal of the high school and the city of Irving.
The boy and his family left Irving and moved to Qatar last October.