Fox News Host Says Ahmed Mohamed 'Did A Really Dumb Thing' By Bringing Clock To School

A Fox News host on Thursday defended the suspension and arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old student who brought a homemade clock to school that his teachers mistook for a bomb.

Andrea Tantaros said on "Outnumbered" that the Muslim teen did a "really dumb thing."

"This story ... has everyone, I think, scratching their heads," she said. "This clock -- does anyone think that it did not look like a dangerous weapon out of a 'Die Hard' movie?"

Ahmed, a 9th-grader at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, brought a homemade clock to school on Monday to show off his love of robotics and tinkering with gadgets. He said he hoped his teachers might be impressed by his abilities. Instead, the student found himself taken to the principal's office, interrogated, arrested and taken to a detention center, where officials took his mug shot and fingerprints. After police realized the clock wasn't a bomb after all, Ahmed was released and all charges were dropped against him. 

All the while, the teen insisted that he had simply built a clock.

"We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb," police spokesman James McLellan told The Dallas Morning News. "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

That's because it was just a clock.

Yet Tantaros still defended the school and law enforcement officials for the actions they took against Ahmed.

"The teacher did her job," Tantaros said. "We have an FBI document out there right now that talks about what to look for. Okay? This is part of it and we've seen terror attacks before. We've seen them use cell phones and innate objects."

Later in the segment, Tantaros conceded that the arrest was "probably over the top," but maintained that the student should not have done what he did.

Tantaros was also critical of President Barack Obama's open support of Ahmed. As outrage spread over the school's and police department's reactions to the clock, Obama, along with other politicians and high-profile scientists, rallied around Ahmed and his passion for science.

"What the president did, by elevating this story to national attention, is he basically got rid of 'If you see something, say something,'" Tantaros said. "And look, Ahmed is a smart kid. He's probably going to go to MIT and make a ton of money, but he did a really dumb thing and brought it to school and the president just elevated this to a national issue that doesn't deserve elevating, frankly."

H/T Media Matters

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