Time is up for “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed and his father Mohamed’s desperate, attention-seeking, discrimination lawsuit against the city of Irving, Texas, and its school district.
On Tuesday, United States District Judge Sam Lindsay dismissed the Mohameds’ lawsuit “with prejudice,” meaning the case is over and done with.
Not 10 months ago, in May 2017, Judge Lindsay dismissed a similar discrimination suit by the family.
He ruled that no Irving city or school official “intentionally discriminated against A.M. based on his race or religion” when, in September 2015, officials questioned and arrested Ahmed for bringing to school what looked like a bomb.
But at the time of that ruling the judge left the door open to the Mohameds amending and refiling their lawsuit, which they did a few days later.
On September 14, 2015, Ahmed, then 14, brought a reassembled digital clock to school to show his teachers.
But the clock looked more like a bomb. So his teacher, acting as any responsible teacher would when confronted with something that looks like a bomb, confiscated it and reported the incident to the school’s principal, who decided the potential of a threat was plausible enough to call the police.
When police came to the school, they questioned Ahmed and were able to determine that the device was not a bomb. But they arrested him under the suspicion that it may have been a “hoax bomb,” and brought him to the police station so as to be able to further clarify the boy’s intentions.
Police later released Ahmed to his parents, and did not charge him, determining that he had no malicious intent.
Ahmed became an overnight cause célèbre among progressives, who pointed to the school’s reaction to Ahmed’s clock that looked like a bomb as an example of racism and Islamophobia.
President Obama tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and Twitter also extended their support.
Four days after the incident, Ahmed’s father said his son would be withdrawing from the school. The next month the family moved to Qatar, where Ahmed reportedly received an education scholarship from the Qatar Foundation.
In November 2015, Ahmed’s family threatened Irving and the school district with a lawsuit if they did not pay the laughable sum of $15 million — plus offer a public apology. Irving refused.
The following year the Mohameds filed multiple lawsuits. One was the discrimination against Irving and the school district, which called for unspecified damages.
Judge Lindsay dismissed it, explaining that Principal Daniel Cummings was “responsible for the safety of students and others on campus” and made a reasonable decision given the limited information he had available, and the perceived risk of the device actually being a bomb.
The other lawsuit was a defamation suit against several media outlets and commentators, including Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck. That was quickly thrown out as well, with legal fees and court costs awarded to the defendants.
Yesterday’s one-paragraph dismissal by Judge Lindsay brings Clock Boy’s record in court to 0-3.