The ‘Clock-Maker’ & the Butcher

Teen “clockmaker” Ahmed Mohamed’s tale just got a whole lot murkier. Ever since his arrest last month, when teachers at his Texas school mistook his clockwork device for a bomb, 14yearold Ahmed has been on a whirlwind global tour, feted as a victim of Islamophobia.

That was capped off last night by a visit to the White House at the personal Twitter invite of President Obama.

But it comes just days after Ahmed gleefully posed for pictures in Khartoum with Sudanese President Omar Hassan alBashir.

OK: Ahmed and his family are Sudanese immigrants; his dad has twice run for the nation’s presidency (despite being a US immigrant), including as recently as last February.

But Bashir is a massmurdering warlord, indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His atrocities have Sudan under US sanctions. Bashir was behind the genocide in Darfur — once a huge cause on the left.

In 2006, thousands gathered at the National Mall for a “Save Darfur” rally at which thenSen. Barack Obama declared, “If we act, then the world will follow.” Now the latest cheerleader for the butcher of Darfur is a welcome guest at Obama’s White House?

All this is just the latest twist to this tale, which has seen the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations hail young Ahmed as “American Muslim of the Year.”

Questions have even surfaced about the device itself — now widely reported as just the inner workings of a commercial clock.

From the start, this affair was bound to be politicized. But the use Ahmed Mohamed and his family have made of his notoriety is appalling.