A Muslim student shared unexpected revelations about the same Texas high school attended by “Clock Boy” Ahmed in documents Breitbart Texas obtained through an open records request. The documents reveal a viewpoint unheard so far because Irving Independent School District officials cannot voice their side of the story due to federal privacy laws connected to the Mohamed family’s not signing a waiver to allow this information to become public.
Amena Jamali, a Muslim female and MacArthur High School’s 2015 valedictorian, reached out to “Mac,” short for MacArthur, family upon reading about Ahmed Mohamed in a truncated
article that
linked to the
Dallas Morning News. The news story retold the Islamophobia victim version of the clock-in-a-box story with Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed claiming the arrest happened “…because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.” McArthur High School is the school attended by “Clock Boy” Ahmed at the time of the incident.
One of the documents Breitbart Texas obtained is Jamali’s lengthy Oct. 1 email to MacArthur High principal Dan Cummings, which completely dismantles the leftwing attack narrative that Ahmed’s Sept. 14 arrest was racially motivated. Jamali describes the opposite picture, calling “Mac” the place that changed her life, where she felt “respected as a Muslim.” She dubbed Irving ISD a place “that taught pride, accommodated Muslim prayer and dietary needs” and where “students of my religious community, including me, (are granted) two weeks every year to attend a religious ceremony.” Jamali wrote they allowed her to take “a whole month of school off and go for Haj.”
Jamali clearly excelled in the cultural environment at the place she calls “Mac.” Along the way to becoming class valedictorian, she was recognized nationally for her accomplishments. in June, 2013, she travelled with some of her teachers and classmates to New York City where she competed as a finalist in the
National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge. Jamali and her teammate Juan Ramos created a software game named “Better than History.”
In May, 2014, she and Ramos were invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in a science fair competition. The White House
said the two teens are “Changing the World through Online Games.”
Now a college student, Jamali acknowledged she did not know first-hand what occurred at MacArthur with Ahmed, then underscored, “…Mac is a place where there is no or very little prejudice.”
She took exception to one-sided news media that “blows the one incidence into a general presumption about Irving ISD…” She told Cummings she considered writing a letter to the
Dallas Morning News: “I really do think it’s unfair that such a great school (the best in the world) is spoken of so poorly for a single day, when there were so many more amazing days.”