On Tuesday, a district court judge in Texas slammed the door shut on a defamation lawsuit filed on behalf of “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed by his father against a host of people and companies, including a local Fox News affiliate, Glenn Beck, TheBlaze, and the mayor of Irving, Texas.
Mohamed rose to fame about a year ago when he brought a clock that looked a whole lot more like a bomb than a clock to his high school in Irving. When Mohamed began acting strangely, the police came in and briefly detained him, after which he was suspended for three days for what school authorities suspected was a “hoax bomb” stunt. Clock Boy’s family and the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) pushed the incident as a textbook example of “Islamophobia” and the then-14-year-old became the darling of the Left, endearing himself to none other than President Barack Obama, who praised the clock he “invented” (he actually just took the outer casing off an already working clock and put it in a sketchy looking case) as a “cool” and invited him to the White House.
His father sued Center for Security Policy’s Jim Hanson and Beck because of statements made by Hanson on Beck’s show about “the connection between the Clock Boy hoax bomb affair, the attendant media frenzy created in large part by his father Mohamed, civilization jihad, and the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front group in the United States that promotes civilization jihad.”
According to the American Freedom Law Center’s account of the trial, the attorney for Clock Boy did not have her best day in court:
During the lengthy hearing, Judge [Maricela] Moore pressed Mohamed’s lawyer, Fort Worth attorney Susan Hutchison, to provide any facts that would suggest that Hanson and the other defendants had said anything false or defamatory about Mohamed or his son during the television broadcasts. After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence.
While Mohamed’s attorney seemed to find it difficult to come up with much to say, the lawyers with AFLC , which filed the motion to dismiss the groundless charges on behalf of two of the people accused by Clock Boy, apparently did not have a hard time making their arguments.
During the hearing, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel David Yerushalmi explained to Judge Moore that the purpose of the lawfare-driven lawsuit was to intimidate into silence those who might comment publicly on the connection between jihad, terrorism, sharia, and Islam. As such, Yerushalmi argued, “this case is a classic Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or ‘SLAPP’ case and should be dismissed.”
Judge Moore issued her ruling the same day, dismissing the lawsuit with prejudice.
After he left the courtroom, Yerushalmi offered some more thoughts on the attempts of Islamists to silence critics. “This lawsuit filed by Clock Boy’s father is yet another example of Islamist lawfare, which is a component of the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad,” he said, adding, “The Islamists employ the progressive mainstream media to label any public criticism of a sharia-centric, jihad-driven Islam as ‘Islamophobic,’ and they add fear and financial ruin to the equation by utilizing the legal system to file SLAPP actions.”
The AFLC is now actively seeking sanctions against Mohamed’s father and asking for the court to cover legal fees.
H/T PJ Media