‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Returns: Just Couldn’t Stay Away from Texas

AP Photo/LM Otero
AP File Photo/LM Otero
Merrill Hope

“Clock Boy” Ahmed returned to the United States late Monday afternoon, June 27, landing at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Breitbart Texas reported the “homesick” teenager just couldn’t stay away from Texas. Ahmed, his parents, and siblings walked into the airport terminal greeted by a crowd of family and a hoard of TV news crews.

KDFW 4 (Fox) reported the Mohamed family “alerted” the TV news outlet to the teen’s return. His grandmother flew in from the Sudan for this homecoming, according to the local Fox affiliate.

The teen and his family have been living in Qatar for the past nine months where he accepted a fully-funded education scholarship from the Qatar Foundation. Monday, Ahmed told reporters he came back for a summer internship with Twitter.

Ahmed also said Facebook, NASA, and even, MIT, the prestigious university he nixed in favor of attending the Qatari school, contacted him over social media, asking him to visit while he is stateside this summer.

He told KDFW 4 there is a 50/50 chance he will finish high school in the U.S. and not Qatar. However, the Dallas Morning News reported the teen plans to return to Qatar to finish high school and attending an American college remains a possibility. Conversely, KDFW 4 reported the teen said he definitely wants to go to a U.S. college.

“School was amazing over there,” the teen explained to the Dallas newspaper. Regardless of where he studies, he says his interests are coding, engineering and technology.

“It’s beautiful to be here in U.S.A,” added Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who also spoke to news media. He told KDFW 4: “It is our home and it is our country and we love it.”

The patriotic sounding Mohamed patriarch, however, posted a controversial photo last September of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers enveloped in smoke during the heinous 2001 terrorist attacks on his Sudanese National Reform party page, which Breitbart Texas reported. This post sourced to the Sudanese Military Establishment and asserted a truther philosophy that 9/11 was an inside job, calling these “so-called” events a “rumor.”

In October, the elder Mohamed, shared another 9/11 “truther” Facebook post in Arabic, musing the clock incident would lead to spreading Islam in America, as Breitbart Texas reported. This post contained troubling translated statements that furthered 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mohamed also claimed Islamophobia at the core of his son’s clock making troubles last year, something he appeared to dance around when speaking to reporters at DFW Airport Monday.

Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed said: “As you see, if there is something wrong, America will stand for it and that is what happened. Something was happening to my son. Everybody has a heart, has children, Something is wrong, so they stood for it,” according to the local Fox affiliate.

The teen told reporters he intends to make spending time with friends and family his first priority.

“Ahmed and his family have missed his grandmother, his aunts, uncles, cousins and friends here in Irving and across North Texas very much,” Uncle Aldean Mohamed said. “Ahmed and his nuclear family miss America and their whole family here in America very much.”

The uncle reconfirmed for KDFW 4 that the family still plans to sue for a total of $15 million — $10 million from the City of Irving and $5 million from the school district. In a 10-page demand letter to the City of Irving attorney and a similar 9-page letter to Irving Independent School District attorney last November, the family claimed “Islamophobia” among their clock related incident allegations.

Ahmed Mohamed skyrocketed to fame after bringing into MacArthur High School a homemade digital clock-in-a-box that resembled a “hoax bomb.” School officials and police initially detained him based on zero tolerance policies but no charges were ever filed once the situation sorted itself out. Ahmed got three days of out-of-school (OSS) suspension because of the school district’s Student Code of Conduct, which is based on the state’s 1995 Safe Schools Act and Chapter 37 of the Texas Education Code. It addresses threats, hoaxes, and perceived or discretionary threats and their harsh consequences. Still, progressive media propped him up as the Islamophobia poster child.

Follow Merrill Hope on Twitter @OutOfTheBoxMom.

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