I want to remind you of a story that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, because it demonstrates something about how people process information they're given. When the first of the Twin Towers collapsed, or so the story went, there was a man standing on the roof. As the building went down, the man "surfed the building to the ground" and walked away. This circulated for a couple of days and was widely accepted as true.
But of course, it wasn't true. No one can "surf" a building more than 100 stories to the ground and walk away. It's absurd on its face, and once it was revealed as baloney, people who believed it felt like morons. But at a time when something has happened that no one could have quite imagined, your entire frame of reference for what's real and what's possible gets thrown into question. You become open to suggestions that you would never have considered because you're simply not sure what to believe.
So let's go now to the story of the moment, in which 14-year-old Ahmed Mohammed supposedly "invented a clock" and brought it to school, only to have teachers and other school officials freak out because it looked like a suitcase bomb. And since Ahmed is Muslim, well, discrimination, Islamophobia, blah blah blah. And needless to say, school officials and police didn't help matters by actually handcuffing the kid in a clear example of what the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has long identified as the insanity of "Zero Tolerance" policies.
But in the midst of all this, few asked a simple question: Is it really plausible that this 14-year-old kid "invented a clock"? Well, someone did ask the question. His name is Thomas Talbot, and I will tell you right now that I don't know who he is apart from an apparent background in engineering. But he often posts on YouTube to talk about engineering type issues, and when Talbot took a look at this photo of Ahmed's supposed clock invention, nothing appeared right to him, as he explains here in impressive detail:
So this raises a sticky question. The media may simply accept out of hand the notion that Ahmed "invented a clock," but if he really didn't, then who put this together and what was the point of doing so? It's possible, of course, that Ahmed threw this together, took it to school to show his teacher and misused the term "invented" in the course of explaining what he did.
Talbot's theory, though, is that someone else put it together and its purpose was to inspire the very reaction it got - presumably to provoke an incident that would forward the narrative that America is full of Islamophobic bigots - a storyline you can advance very easily when your supposed victim is an innocent 14-year-old. It didn't take long for the White House to get on board, or for the entire Internet to embrace the dopey #IStandWithAhmed hashtag.
Let's be honest here, shall we? It looks like a bomb. Any teacher who looked at it and didn't get concerned would have been derelict in his or her duty. A mischief maker, knowing full well that the contraption looked like a bomb, could easily envision an overreaction that could be used to score propaganda points.
Do I think that's what happened? Here's what I do think: A guy on YouTube is asking questions about this "invention" that the media should be asking, but isn't. And that alone makes the rest of the story they're pushing on us completely illegitimate. That doesn't mean it was a wise decision to slap handcuffs on the kid. It just means there is a whole other set of questions to this story that real journalists would have asked, instead of leaving to a guy on YouTube to do it.
I want to remind you of a story that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, because it demonstrates something about how people process information they're given. When the first of the Twin Towers collapsed, or so the story went, there was a man standing on the roof. As the building went down, the man "surfed the building to the ground" and walked away. This circulated for a couple of days and was widely accepted as true.
