Defending her recent controversial tweet on the American schoolboy arrested for carrying a home-made clock-in-a-box to school, author Taslima Nasreen said the anxiety of his teachers “is not unfounded.”
Ahmed Mohamed was arrested last week after a teacher thought the 14-year-old Texas boy had brought a “hoax bomb” to school.
He was later released and received massive outpouring of support.
“Ahmed is a nice boy, sharp and intelligent, but it is also true that young Muslim boys do plant bombs and thus I would say that the fear is not unfounded,” the author living in exile since 1994 said.
“If I could see Ahmed Mohamed’s home-made clock, I would hv mistaken his things for a bomb. Why ppl think Muslims can bring bombs? Cause they do,” she tweeted.
Ms. Nasreen was lambasted on the social media following the tweet. Thousands called her a “bigot.”
“[This is] how Taslima Nasreen earns her bread, in one tweet,” said a blogger.
However, many others backed her views, calling her a “nationalist Indian” who is a “follower of Sanatana [Hindu] Dharma.”
Ms. Nasreen describes herself as an atheist. “In Islam, kids are trained to belt a bomb and blow themselves up, [therefore] such suspicion was obvious,” the author said and cited the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
“They [Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev] were also nice people who were brainwashed by followers of Islam. So they are suspects,” Ms. Nasreen told The Hindu. “It is true that white American kids carry firearms and are involved in massacres. But those kids are on their own…they are not brainwashed by Christianity. But the kids in Islam are brainwashed in the name of Islam by Boko Haram or ISIS — that is the difference.”
