It seems like everyone loves 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving, Texas student who was unfairly arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school earlier this week. President Obama tweeted the kid his support and Flavor Flav told the world to “STOP clock blocking.” But there are some pundits out there who haven’t jumped on the Ahmed bandwagon—or used the #IStandWithAhmed hashtag— and Bill Maher is one of them.
On Friday’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, the host shared his thoughts and opinions about the bomb scare incident, Upworthy reports. While Maher thinks Ahmed deserves an apology from school officials (“No doubt about it,” he said. “They were wrong.”), he thinks the student’s teacher did nothing wrong by bringing the homemade clock to school officials’ attention.
“People at the school thought it might be a bomb,” he said on the show, “because it looks exactly like a fucking bomb.”
And if what it had been a bomb, he posited. “So the teacher’s just supposed to see something that looks like a bomb and be, ‘Oh, wait, this might just be my white privilege talking?’” Maher joked. “ ‘ I sure don’t want to be politically incorrect, so I’ll just let it go.’ ”
Maher, however, does not deny that the fact that Ahmed is Muslim played a role in escalating the incident. “It’s not the color of his skin,” he said. “For the last 30 years, it’s been one culture that has been blowing shit up over and over again.”
