{"id":8686,"date":"2015-09-28T13:21:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T20:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8686"},"modified":"2015-09-28T13:30:19","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T20:30:19","slug":"ahmed-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahmed-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama\/","title":{"rendered":"Ahmed and the Art of the Psychodrama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahmed the clockmaker and Columbia\u2019s Mattress Girl are reminders that there are careerist advantages to becoming a victim of religious, racial, or sexual prejudice.\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

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Photo via: everything-pr.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During Pope Francis\u2019s parade in Washington, 5-year-old Sophie Cruz\u00a0suddenly\u00a0dashed up to the popemobile and handed His Holiness a note\u00a0about the\u00a0wretched plight of her illegal-alien parents from Los Angeles, who are apparently terrified of all the recent talk about deportations. The media loved the\u00a0spontaneity\u00a0and courage of 5-year-old Sophie.<\/p>\n

But that was not quite the whole story. The entire event reportedly had been scripted for about a year by a\u00a0group\u00a0called\u00a0\u201cFull Rights for Immigrants Coalition,\u201d which, in actuality, is not about immigration per se, but rather full rights for illegal immigrants.\u00a0According to spokesman\u00a0Juan Jose Gutierrez,\u00a0the group had carefully planned Sophie\u2019s dash: \u201cWe planned to do this from the moment we learned he was coming to the States\u2026.We have been working for a while now trying to sensitize the American public that dealing with immigration is not just dealing with the people who came in without proper documents but that we also have \u2026 countless children whose parents are undocumented.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Using a 5-year-old girl under the false pretenses of a spontaneous outburst of emotion seems about as authentic as deliberately conflating legal immigration \u2014 the United\u00a0States accepts more immigrants than does any other nation \u2014 with illegal immigrants who deliberately and knowingly break federal law to enter the U.S.<\/p>\n

Recently, social media created a victim-hero out of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, whose plight with local school authorities earned him global commiseration \u2014 and invitations to visit almost everyone from Barack Obama in the White House and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook to the United Nations. \u00a0How did teenager Ahmed become an international celebrity?<\/p>\n

He supposedly spontaneously brought a \u201cclock\u201d to school that he had built from scratch. Soon after, Ahmed was alleged by his supposedly dim-witted school to have instead brought in something that appeared to look like, or perhaps even sound like, a bomb. After questioning, the young Edison was expelled \u2014 purportedly because he was presumed guilty as a son of Sudanese immigrants and a Muslim. Was Ahmed another innocent child victimized by the oppressive forces of traditional racist America?<\/p>\n

Again, hardly. Almost everything that Ahmed and his family have alleged is being proved first fantasy, and, second, a likely set-up. One, his \u201cclock\u201d was no brilliant invention. Ahmed just took the plastic case cover off an old 1986 digital alarm clock and reinserted the insides into a pencil box \u2014 something any teenager could do, but probably would see no need to.<\/p>\n