WASHINGTON / NEW YORK: The 14-year-old “Ahmed Mohamed is the Muslim hero America has been waiting for”, declares a columnist as hashtag “IStandWithAhmed” becomes the No 1 trending topic on Twitter.

“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed,” wrote Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you. Keep building.”

Take a look: #IStandWithAhmed: How the internet stood up for a wronged Muslim student

His post received more than a million likes and more than 163,000 people shared it.

The Presbyterian church leaders in Irving, Texas, where Ahmed lives, goes to school and was arrested for making a clock, have offered to buy him a 3-D printer and other engineering tools.

The White House press secretary said on Thursday that Ahmed had been invited to attend an astronomy night event at the White House next month. He also declared that the teenager’s teachers had “failed him”.

On Wednesday, President Obama tweeted in his support and asked him to bring his homemade clock to the White House.

The massive outpouring of sympathies for the Texan teenager also forced the Irving police, which arrested and handcuffed Ahmed on Monday for bringing a possible bomb-device to school, to drop the charges.

The freshman at MacArthur High School also received an invitation to visit NASA. On hearing the news he told reporters, who flocked to his modest home, that he loves NASA T-shirts and hopes to go to MIT one day.

As his family served pizzas and drinks to the news media Ahmed greeted them with “as-salaamu alaykum”.

He said the attention he was getting after the incident made him feel “really outstanding” and urged the people “not just to help me but to help every other kid in the entire world that has a problem like this”.

Ahmed said he made the clock out of a metal briefcase-style box, a digital display, wires and a circuit board.

At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Ahmed’s arrest was a case study in prejudice in an era when America was fighting terrorism at home and abroad.

“This episode is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do,” he said.

Texas Democrats said Ahmed’s detention was an outgrowth of the anti-Muslim sentiments of Irving officials.

The city’s mayor, Beth Van Duyne, has been outspoken in criticising a Muslim group that mediates disputes between the area’s Muslim residents, accusing it of establishing an anti-American Sharia court of law.

The Dallas County Democratic Party said Ahmed’s arrest was “a logical conclusion to Islamophobia in Irving and it’s deplorable”.

The party’s chairwoman Carol Donovan claimed that Irving mayor was a fear-monger who stoked the flames of Islamophobia.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2015

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