Police were placed on high alert Friday after teachers from an Irving, Texas, high school discovered what they thought was a bomb resembling a giant clock mounted on the side of a rocket and placed next to Parliament in London. British PM David Cameron was hauled away in handcuffs by Bobbies and detained for several hours.
Bobby Jindal, campaigning in Iowa, said, “Two things: I told you so and I am the only one qualified to be president because I said it first!”
Louisiana Voice 
I must have lost track of time. Is it aprtil fool day Tomas?
Who wrote the rule that we must wait until April 1 when any time is a good time to poke a little fun at two absurdities: those teachers and police who over-reacted to that 14-year-old who brought a clock to school and, of course, our very own court jester, Bobby Jindal?
I read on a national blog (Daily Kos, I think) that, in fact, teachers & administrators at that Irving, Texas high school, actually never believed that the digital clock created by a Muslim student was a bomb. They simply wanted to humiliate & discredit the Muslim student. The article made the point that the “bomb” was not removed from the classroom when the teacher reported the incident, nor were students evacuated from the class or the building at any time. Once removed from the classroom, it sat in the office for hours with no apparent alarm, even after the young man was arrested. Young Mohammad gets the last laugh as he now has the attention & good will of a multitude of top engineering schools in the nation who will surely fight over welcoming this creative standout student to their ranks!
You are correct. In fact, it was reported by several news services that there was no evacuation because no one ever thought it was a bomb and the clock was allowed to remain in the building. The entire episode crystalizes the idiotic Islam phobia that seems to dominate the thinking of people like Jindal. Throw in his guttural utterances of “radical right wing Republicans like me good, Democrats bad,” and you have the explanation of why he is wallowing at 1 percent in Iowa and even worse elsewhere.
So much for STEAM in schools.
“…idiotic Islam phobia…”?? Having deployed twice to the Middle East in 1990-91 and again in 2003 and after spending the better part of 25 years studying radical Islam and Islamic terrorism those three words scare me to no small end.
Regardless of your feelings about the ‘clock incident’, in particular, and Bobby Jindal, in general, it is incredibly naive to think Islam [which means ‘surrender’ in Arabic] does not present a threat to the USA. Radical Islam has been at war with the USA since the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis and there is a litany of incidents to prove it not least of which is 9/11.
While the majority, probably even a super-majority, of Muslims are undeniably peace-loving and nonviolent, history and events in Europe since WWII have shown once the population of Muslims in a country approaches 5% problems begin to surface. England, France, Germany, Denmark, etc have all experienced such problems related to Muslims and Islam. In the case of the USA, however, we are already beginning to see these things surface
Most of this stems from Muslim beliefs and demands related to Sharia law which is unequivocally not compatible with the US Constitution or beliefs of western civilization. For example, under Sharia Law a Muslim is allowed and even encouraged to lie to a non-Muslim for any reason (taqiyya). That only begins to scratch the surface of those things allowed by Sharia law which we, as Americans, find distasteful or repugnant. e.g. How about marriage to your ’14’ year old daughter or granddaughter?
If you want to see more such examples, go to this link: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/09/25/medias-cowardice-during-can-a-muslim-be-president-controversy-dumbs-down-americans-and-weakens-public-safety-256221
I would not vote for Bobby Jindal to be dog-catcher much less President but based on my experiences and studies his distrust of Islam is neither idiotic nor phobic. In recent years, which, coincidentally, seem to follow our current President’s term of office, Islamic political organizations have begun to exert pressure to have Sharia law legalized in the USA. If this ever happens the freedoms we know and love will be irrevocably changed or lost.
Yours is a well-stated, reasoned and intelligent response and I certainly respect your military service as well as your viewpoint. I never discourage dissenting opinion because God knows, I’m certainly not all-wise. My point was—and is—we created a lot of the problems with Islam with our foreign policy which seems to be an irresistible urge to stick our noses into other countries’ business. The hostage situation in Iran in the ’70s stems from our propping up a corrupt Shah against the Iranians’ will—all in the interest of oil. We were hell-bent on toppling Saddam whom we installed in office in the first place. Even Rand Paul said Isis is a creation of U.S. foreign policy. Islam’s hostility toward the West dates back to the Crusades in which Christians literally slaughtered tens of thousands of Islamics. I won’t even go into the Biblical history of the Arab-Jewish conflict. I don’t pretend to know the answers, but I have been around seven decades now and I have seen how we always find it necessary to have enemies and if we can’t find them, we create them. Depending on the generation, it has been the Red Scare of McCarthyism, blacks, Mexicans, Islam, and even general hatred of the Irish, Asians, Italians…the list goes on and on.
It seems we are always ready to go to war but seldom ready to attempt to understand others’ positions.
Tom – I agree with almost everything you said in your response. There is no question US foreign policy has caused problems in the Middle East including ISIS. Just for the record, I did NOT agree with the 2003 Iraq invasion because we were already in Afghanistan. That decision stretched the US military to the breaking point. It forced the US Army and Marine Corps to use the National Guard and Reserve components of the US military as an Operational Reserve rather than the Strategic Reserve they were intended to be. In the end, US foreign policy led to the loss of both wars and the senseless waste of lives of good men and women who served and died in both places.
The only real disagreement I have is related to your comment on the Crusades. The Crusades were the inevitable results of the Muslim Conquests which preceded the Crusades. During the period of Islamic expansion thousands of Christians AND ‘non’-Christians were given the choice of ‘surrendering’ and converting to the religion with the name “Surrender’ or dying. I daresay as many people died in that period as did those during the Crusades. In addition, however, the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem tore down all vestiges of Christianity in the city and completely closed it to all Christian pilgrimages. Small wonder Christianity reacted the way it did.
I will close by saying the only people I ‘hate’ are those who would take the freedoms we know and enjoy as Americans. Other than that, I moved past ‘hating’ a long time ago…..
Expanding on Gunner’s thread: Did you catch at the time George Duh?bya Bush’s repeated assertions that we were going on a Crusade in the areas as we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? HIs wording was no accident. The prize all along was for the military industrial complex (Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, et al) to make billions. The cost of US lives and Middle Eastern civilian lives, not to mention trillions in debt with which they try to saddle Obama, not in their purview. “Evil-doers” all!