Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old from Texas who became known as the “Clock Kid” after he was arrested for bringing a clock to school that was mistaken for a bomb, will be moving with his family to Qatar, the BBC reported Wednesday.
Ahmed has accepted a scholarship from the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, where he will study. …
The Qatar Foundation is providing a full scholarship for his secondary and undergraduate education, according to a news release.“Our family has been overwhelmed by the many offers of support we have received since the unfortunate incident of Ahmed’s arrest,” the Mohamed family said in the release. “From the White House to Sudan, to Mecca, we have been welcomed by a variety of individuals, businesses and educational institutions.”
According to his family, Ahmed will be part of the Qatar Foundation’s “young innovators” program. “Qatar was a cool place to visit,” Ahmed said in a press release. “I loved the city of Doha because it’s so modern. I saw so many amazing schools there, many of them campuses of famous American universities. The teachers were great. I think I will learn a lot and have fun too.”
In recent months, Qatar has stepped up its efforts at polishing its image, but not the conditions of its migrant workers, who are treated like slaves. Last year, over 180 migrant workers died while working in terrible conditions to build the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Last week, the Mohamed family met with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. This Tuesday, Ahmed met President Barack Obama during a White House event organized to encourage students to pursue careers in scientific fields.
In The Fruitful Game: How Qatar Uses Soccer to Polish Its Image, which was published in the October 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, senior editor Ben Cohen recounted an incident where the Qatar Foundation used its financial resources to disguise the country’s dismal human rights record.
By readily demonstrating their seemingly bottomless largesse, the Qataris help themselves out as well. Until the early part of this decade, it’s safe to say that most soccer fans rarely, if ever, gave thought to the tiny Persian Gulf monarchy that has been ruled by the al-Thani family since the middle of the nineteenth century. But in 2011, in an extraordinary public relations coup, the Qataris began a commercial relationship with FC Barcelona, the Catalan champions of the Spanish league, who were then at their masterly peak.
The Barcelona deal was an eyebrow-raising arrangement between a wealthy, conservative petrostate and a soccer club steeped in left-wing politics and Catalan nationalism—until the Qataris came along, Barcelona steadfastly refused commercial sponsorship of their shirts, displaying instead the logo of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Cannily, the Qataris opted to spend their $40 million annual sponsorship of Barcelona through the Qatar Foundation, ostensibly an educational and community organization created in 1995 by the then-Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Everybody won: Barcelona retained their illusory non-profit image while getting a serious injection of cash, and the Qataris reveled in a bonanza of positive publicity.
As sports retailers happily fed the insatiable public appetite for child-size replica jerseys of Barcelona idols like Lionel Messi and Andres Iniesta, the Qatar Foundation, whose logo was emblazoned in generous letters on the front of the shirt, became globally recognized. In the process, Qatar’s external image transformed from that of a remote desert emirate, 94 percent of whose inhabitants are migrant workers denied the education and healthcare rights granted to Qatari citizens, into a powerhouse supporter of scientific and commercial research, whether through the Qatar Foundation or through the numerous universities, like Carnegie Mellon and Paris’s HEC business school, with campuses in Qatar. By 2013, the Qataris were so confident of their progress that they swapped out the Qatar Foundation logo on Barcelona’s shirt for that of Qatar Airways, with no objections on the part of the Barcelona management.
[Photo: wochit News / YouTube ]