As if the arrest of high school student Ahmed Mohamed for bringing a homemade clock to school to show his teacher wasn’t bad enough, now we have the right wing nutjobs–with their electronic bullhorn Fox News–claiming that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy designed to make their rampant Islamophobia seem as racist and intolerant as it truly is and always will be.
Yep, here we go again.
One of the resident airheads at Fox, Andrea Tantaros, spewed out this heap of crap on air:
“What the president did, by elevating this story to national attention, is he basically got rid of ‘if you see something, say something.’”
No, Andrea, he didn’t. But I’m not surprised that you made that monumental leap of flawed logic in order to bolster your incredibly shaky underlying premise.
Joining in the lies was dear old Pamela Geller, she of the anti-Islam art contest held earlier this year in Garland, Texas. According to Geller, a master spinner of conspiracy theories, the whole incident with the clock is a plot by President Obama to harm American national security:
“This story is pure agitprop most fatal. ’If you see something, say something’ is now racism. The whole thing has clearly been a setup, and its effect will be to make Americans less safe. If you ever see a Muslim with a suspicious object, remember the lesson of Ahmed Mohamed: to say something would be ‘racism.’ That could end up being the epitaph of America and the free world.”
I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t live in constant fear about a terrorist attack. Do you? If you live in terror, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that the terrorists have already won?
Another nutbag group of saber-rattling extremists, the Oath Keepers, said the teacher who reported Ahmed did the right thing and added:
“As is anyone who believes a prime function of government is to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as opposed to flooding the Republic with inimical alien cultures. The Opposite Day madness of the ginned up outrage is that the teacher did exactly what Obama’s Department of Homeland Security tells citizens to do. Hell, they’ve even trademarked it: If You See Something Say Something.”
And the right wing has now trademarked ignorance and hatred in the name of safety.
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org.