Washington Post: Obama says he supports Ahmed Mohamed, but his policies don’t

Epa? Are you starting to understand?

From the Washington Post:

What happened to Ahmed Mohamed could happen to any American Muslim. 

On Monday, the 14-year-old was surrounded by five uniformed police officers, handcuffed and sent to a detention center after he brought a homemade clock to his high school in Irving, Tex. He had previously built radios, and even a Bluetooth speaker. 

But this time, his creativity was rewarded with a three-day suspension from school, a sentence decried across the nation: Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged Ahmed to keep innovating. Technology titans Google, Facebook and Twitter invited Ahmed to their headquarters. 

And President Obama invited Ahmed to the White House. 

But the counter-extremism policies that Obama supports seem to encourage such severe responses to normal behavior in Muslim youth. While it’s easy to dispel Ahmed’s case and what happened in Irving as an aberration, fear and demonization of American Muslims is the norm. 

At a White House summit in February, Obama championed the Department of Homeland Security’s “countering violent extremism” program, which calls on teachers, faith leaders and neighbors to suss out early indicators of extremism and report them to law enforcement. 

This federal initiative, which largely targets Muslim communities, was piloted in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston, and it is now proliferating across the country.