One of the Prices of Bigoted Demagoguery

Professional Islamophobe Pam Geller brings her trademark (lack of) insight to the Ahmed Mohamed incident, the boy who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school:

"If you ever see a Muslim with a suspicious object, remember the lesson of Ahmed Mohamed: to say something would be 'racism,'" she wrote. "That could end up being the epitaph of America and the free world."

A rational mind might observe that the biggest difference between a homemade clock and a homemade bomb is that the latter involves explosives. Without actual explosives, you have no bomb. Without make-believe explosives, you have no make-believe bomb. But more than that, the reason why the boy's clock looks like a bomb to people like Geller, and the reason any circuit board is going to look like a bomb to the equally addle Frank Gaffney, is because by all appearances everything they know about electronics and bomb-making comes from watching movies.

If we're going to embrace hysterics and suggest that any person in possession of something that looks like it could be used as a trigger device for a bomb should be arrested, whether or not they possess real, fake or imaginary explosives, we can start by arresting any person found in possession of a cellular phone. Meanwhile, if Geller is truly concerned that arresting kids for possessing homemade clocks is going to prevent the arrest of actual criminals, I suggest that she get herself a copy of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", read it, then take a long look at herself in the mirror.