If It Walks Like an Influence Operation…

The more I learn about the facts surrounding the events in Irving, Texas this week, the more it seems we have been bamboozled. The now-universal rendering of the story is that a student named Ahmed Mohamed was wrongly removed from his school in handcuffs for innocently bringing in a homemade “clock.”

The purported injustice of this story has made Ahmed an instant celebrity, winning fawning treatment from MIT to Stephen Colbert to the White House.

The facts, however, suggest this may have been a provocation. Building and bringing to school what sure looked like a trigger for an improvised briefcase bomb would predictably raise an alarm.

For sure, the episode is being exploited by Islamic supremacists and their enablers to further a long-running campaign to impugn a community and its mayor, Beth Van Duyne, for alleged “Islamophobic” attitudes.

And that’s a lie.