Ahmed Mohamed is a 14-year-old boy who formerly attended MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas. Last month he was taken into custody by police, handcuffed and transported to a detention facility. He was suspended from school after bringing a home-assembled digital clock to show it to his engineering teacher. The case sparked debates on racial profiling and Islamophobia, as Mohamed received support from many, including U.S. President Barrack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and retired astronaut Chris Hadfield.

As soon as the news broke, people on social media started trending their support for Ahmed. They dubbed the incident, as well as the boy's treatment by the police, discriminatory and racist.  

But I don’t think there's anything in this story that highlights anything about race being involved. The media deliberately hiked the issue and gave it unnecessary coverage.

I would not be exaggerating if I said white kids are also investigated or detained for similar offenses committed in schools. It literally happens every day. It happens to white kids; it happens to black kids too.

It happens to boys, girls, preschoolers, teenagers, athletes, eggheads, wealthy, poor, gay and straight, religious, atheists. In short, young people of all stripes are strictly monitored for security issues in the U.S. 

I’m not speculating or suggesting that what happened to Ahmed could have happened to a white kid. I’m just asserting the fact that very similar things have happened to white—and black, brown, Asian, Indian, and Latino—kids on a routine basis. Even the kids who bring toy water guns to school have been sent back home and suspended. 

A white American man told me his story.

“When I was 15, my friend and I bought Air soft AK-47s (Air soft guns are of plastic have an orange tip, but are made to look exactly like real guns). Within ten minutes five police cars surrounded us. They were pointing guns, and yelling at us to get on the ground. We were arrested, but when the police realized these were merely toy guns they took us home and told our parents what happened. I was 15, young and stupid, but was the police response an overreaction? Absolutely not. We had what appeared to be the instruments of mass murder. I knew I was probably going to get into some kind of trouble (with my parents or neighbors) when I took the orange tips off.” 

Then there is the example of the student who brought a pressure cooker to the Boston Marathon two years ago. It had been morphed into a bomb which killed many and several were injured.

People really need to stop using their ethnicity or religion as a victim card, when they are being detained for a perfectly legitimate reason. 

The bottom line in Ahmed’s case is the good intention of the teachers and their anxiousness for the safety of the student. It is perfectly logical to want your kids to be safe while at school. Careful vigilance is more important than political correctness. You really need to be on your guard everywhere these days.

 It’s simply always better to be safe than sorry, especially where children are concerned .The teacher did the right thing by calling the cops. I don't blame the teachers owing to the amount of the riots already going on in U.S. schools.

Picture yourself in a classroom and a briefcase get starts beeping. The same sort of noise you have heard associated with bombs in movies. You would surely get terrified.

Kids half Ahmed’s age get suspended for bringing rubber knives to school. 

Anyone who thinks Ahmed would never have been arrested for bringing a similar clock to school if his name was John Smith, should ask any white kid named John to take a similar device to his school.   

Ahmed got arrested and suspended for three days. No charges were filed against him. Later on he was invited to the White House.  He is now a science genius with a future job at NASA, getting recognition and support from all over the world. This may have been an overly paranoid situation but if there was someone with a real bomb and he was not stopped from being into school, everyone would have been asking that why he was not forestalled much earlier. We need to take our hatred for America down a few notches.  

Amna Farooqi, a Pakistani Muslim  living in America, has recently been elected as the President at J Street U ( J Street U is the college and university campus organizing arm of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy organization working towards United States leadership for a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine ).

Then there’s Hadiqa from Swat who was honored in America for raising voice and her struggle against underage marriages in Pakistan. 

I accept that it’s plausible— if not yet definitively proven— that religious discrimination might have played a part in the case of Ahmed Mohamed. And it might also be true to some scale that poor and minority youths are at relatively more risk of mistreatment against the same offenses, but the tolerance and pluralism in their society should also be highlighted.

The flipside shows minorities being moderately treated. Every case of minors and youngsters being apprehended over security concerns cannot be associated with racism or religious discrimination. We need a broader range of retrospection.