When a Clock is a Ticking Time Bomb

When a Clock is a Ticking Time Bomb

Commentary by Sanford D. Horn

September 21, 2015

President Ronald Reagan famously said “trust, but verify” mostly regarding the United States relations with the Soviet Union during the waning days of the Cold War. Excellent advice and it still applies today in virtually all areas of diplomacy, government, and life itself.

Enter Ahmed Mohamed, 14, a ninth grader attending MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas. Mohamed brought to school, on Monday, September 14, a supposed homemade clock – a clock that was not the result of a homework assignment for a science, math, or any other class. This self-imposed show and tell proved more show and very little tell as teachers and Principal Dan Cummings responded to the strangely designed clock with alarm bells of their own.

Could the homemade clock have been something more sinister? Shown side by side, it looks identical to a suitcase bomb – similar to those used to fell airplanes and buildings. Mohamed showed the clock to his engineering teacher who recommended the student not show it to anyone else. Ignoring the advice of his teacher, Mohamed showed the contraption to his English teacher who expressed alarm and contacted Cummings.

The safety of an entire school community at stake, Cummings took the absolute correct action by calling the police. With the spate of school-related violence continuing to rise, and school shootings fervently on the minds of many, better to overreact and be mistaken than underreact and die.

The police questioned Mohamed, who offered little explanation or information, thus his subsequent handcuffing and arrest. Police and school officials offering Mohamed the chance to explain – that was the trust – which when little to no response came, the verify became vital as suspicions grew. Mohamed didn’t even invoke the name of his engineering teacher in his defense.

That Mohamed is a Muslim has turned this story into a cause celeb, the reins of which have been grabbed by Barack Obama. Obama has once again sided with political correctness over safety and security by downplaying the potential for death, destruction, and devastation by quipping “Nice clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?”

As it turns out, Mohamed’s “invention” is nothing more than an old 1980s Radio Shack item reassembled to look like an incendiary devise for reasons unknown. Perhaps to garner sympathy for the Muslim community by demonstrating Islamophobia in the Irving schools? Perhaps as a precursor to something more diabolical?

The boy’s father Mohamed El-Hassan Mohamed claimed his son was tortured by police and school officials. A native of Sudan and a naturalized American, Mohamed frequently returns to his native land to run for president. Additionally, he enlisted the aid of the terror-connected organization CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) to support his son and claim Islamophobia.

Had the student been a white Christian, police and school authorities would be applauded for preventing a potential terrorist attack on children. Instead, charges dropped, punishment at school rescinded, while an elementary school student who bit his breakfast toaster pastry into a crudely shaped “gun,” had his suspension upheld. This is March 2013 story of then seven-year-old Josh Welch, a second grader attending Park Elementary School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, suspended for two days.

Obama is hypocritical by violating his own mantra of “if you see something, say something.” Or perhaps this only applies to white Christians.

I wrote about the vitality of vigilance in my 9-11 column: http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2015/09/another-9-11-vigilance-or-venality.html. This applies 24/7, 365 days a year – everywhere – from elementary schools to bus depots and train stations and from stadiums to airports. Better safe than stupid. The alternative to vigilance is deleterious to our health, our lives, and this nation as a whole.

Sanford D. Horn is a writer and educator living in Westfield, IN.

Another 9-11: Vigilance or Venality

Another 9-11: Vigilance or Venality?

Commentary by Sanford D. Horn

September 9, 2015

Another September 11 is upon us and while the memories fade farther into the sunset, the United States finds itself in a more perilous predicament than on that fateful sunny Tuesday morning in 2001. On that date radical Muslim terrorists flew planes into both towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Pentagon in Arlington, VA, and into a field in Shanksville, PA headed for Washington, DC murdering nearly 3,000 innocent people.

Since that date there have been thousands of terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists, punctuated by those in London, Madrid, Bali, and Benghazi, yet more and more people in the government of the United States can’t bring themselves to utter the words Islamic extremists, radical Muslims, or any other form of accurate verbiage describing the myriad acts perpetrated by a people hell bent on the destruction of Israel, the United States, and Western Civilization.

Since that date al-Qaeda continues to flex its muscles, as have Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, and if those terror organizations aren’t enough of a threat, ISIS or ISIL is demonstrative of new and improved ways to torture, murder, and destroy. This is the same ISIS Barack Obama ignorantly and lightly dismissed as a “JV team.” Well, Mr. Obama, that so-called JV team is committing mayhem and chaos on a major league scale with headless Christian, Jewish, and even Muslim bodies strewn across the countryside of far too many locales.

And while terror is on the rise, the United States is under the thumb of a narcissistic so-called leader who has drawn down the size of military – a military that should be the largest on the planet to remind the world of Ronald Reagan’s call for “peace through strength.” Instead, there is the feckless call for “leading from behind,” a deleterious theory only putting the United States in greater jeopardy.

The United States lacks vigilance both abroad and on the domestic front. The bridge connecting the two is the lack of a strong policy regarding immigration – both legal and illegal. Sleeper cells are awakening in the United States, many of which are populated not just by illegal aliens slipping across the southern border, but countless thousands overstaying visas – visas legally obtained due to a pathetic system too afraid to tell people from enemy nations they are not permitted entry into this country.

For more on the insane situation that is the ongoing spate of illegal aliens, please read the following:

http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2015/07/san-francisco-is-no-treat.html

http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2015/02/fund-homeland-security-not-illegals.html

http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2014/12/illegal-still-means-breaking-law.html

http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2014/06/what-southern-border.html

(Once a flat or fair tax system is enacted to replace the mess that is the IRS, the money saved by eliminating those jobs can be used to hire more people to make more sound judgment regarding who should be allowed entry into the United States and be able to follow up on all visas prior to expiration.) A strict immigration policy must not only be enacted, but adhered to with harsh penalties. The United States may be a land of immigrants, and have an open door, but the United States must no longer be the doormat of the world.

A nation of political correctness in government, the public square, and the public schools is destroying itself from within faster than we can save it. More and more people are thinking it is acceptable to have fewer freedoms and more censorship in media and everyday language – especially in the halls of academia.

Places like at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, where Deepa Kumar, a professor of media studies, born in India, has said “the United States is more brutal than ISIS.” Kumar was the leading proponent against having former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the commencement speaker at Rutgers, who kow-towed to Kumar and her ilk. Apparently liberal tolerance stops with conservatives permitted to speak at a public university.

This will only weaken the United States. The answer to speech with which one disagrees, is not less speech, but more speech. The preservation of the First Amendment to the Constitution is imperative for the preservation of the American way of life. We are not China, Cuba, Iran, or Russia.

It is the left in the United States seeking to shrink the First Amendment, shrink the military, eliminate the Second Amendment, and pray the police, which they march in protest against, will protect us while they call for more police firings or even deaths. I should backtrack, I said the left would “pray the police…” – how silly, the left doesn’t pray – it is their lack of prayer that allowed for condoms in the schools, abortion on demand, but mention G-d anywhere, and there is holy hell to pay.

The recent Planned Parenthood expose detailing their selling of baby body parts is as barbaric as the terrorist activities overseas. For more on that issue, please see: http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2015/07/planned-parenthood-americas-isis.html.

The United States is aiding in its own downfall. Terrorists and illegals are using our own laws against us and the United States is a laughing stock with the so-called feminist movement crying over insignificant issues while a genuine war on women is being perpetrated overseas on a mass scale. While a handful of women want to parade around topless and call it an injustice that they can’t, a real war on women exists in Muslim countries where rape victims are stoned to death under the charge of adultery.

And the supposed “champion” of women’s issues, one Hillary Clinton is raking in millions for the Clinton Foundation from countries whose treatment of women is abysmal at best, but hypocrite Hillary talks out of both sides of her mouth – telling potential voters she is for women, yet delivering speeches and profiting from Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

This is the same Hillary Clinton who has endorsed and supports the Obama deal with Iran that will allow them unfettered access to the materials to build nuclear weaponry, with virtually no true inspection systems in place, and with cash in the pockets of the Iranian despotic regime to the tune of $150 billion. This is the worst foreign policy deal in the world since Munich in 1938. Obama has done his best impression of Neville Chamberlain. For more on the disastrous Iran deal, please see: http://sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com/2015/08/schumer-must-whip-up-minyan.html.

There is no unity opposing a deal so weak one must wonder if those supporting it have forgotten the severity of September 11, 2001. While Iran was not the perpetrator behind the devastation that shocked the world 14 years ago, it vows to execute damage infinitely worse once it becomes a nuclear power, the keys to which are being handed to them by the Obama administration. Without nuclear power Iran is already the chief state sponsor of terror funding terrorist activities in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

So venal are the supporters of this deal, they put party over country, and legacy over security. For all of its faults and foibles, the United States is still the greatest country in the world. People are forever attempting to make this country their home, not escape it. It is incumbent upon the decent citizens of the United States to strengthen our resolve to ensure the future of this nation is one where people are free to speak their minds without fear of retribution, where the rule of law is respected, where an American education actually benefits its recipients in the competitive real world of law, medicine, technology, communications, engineering, architecture, literature, and education itself.

We are at a crossroads in the United States. It is time to take back our country before it becomes another Sodom and Gomorrah. Let not the sacrifice of those who died making the United States what it once was be lost, and let not those 2,977 souls who perished on September 11, 2001 have died in vain.

Sanford D. Horn is a writer and educator living on Westfield, IN. On September 11, 2001 he was working for a newspaper in Northern Virginia and was 10 minutes from the Pentagon on that fateful day.