Recently, social and conventional media outlets have created an international controversy over an unfortunate incident involving a 14-year-old boy named Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested for bringing a hoax bomb to his high school.

The boy was released immediately and no charges were filed. He has received international attention including an invitation to visit the White House, MIT, and Facebook headquarters, an internship with Twitter, and multiple gifts from Microsoft and other international conglomerates.

The clock resembled a bomb in every way, and was by definition a hoax bomb, likely brought to the school to gain attention of the other students and staff.

According to a statement made by Dallas police chief Larry Boyd to USA Today, “Under Texas law, a person is guilty of possessing a hoax bomb if he possesses a device that is intended to cause anyone to be alarmed or a reaction of any type by law enforcement officers.” According to the teachers, Mohamed would not put the clock away when he was told to, effectively defining the clock as a hoax bomb, justifying the teachers’ actions under Texas state law. Similar situations have occurred multiple times involving non-Muslim students, but did not receive any international attention because they do not exemplify the “Racist America” stereotype which is so central to the modern left-wing agenda.

In 2001, 16-year-old Taylor Hess was expelled from his Texas high school after a guard found a kitchen knife in his car. In 2013, seven-year-old Josh Welch was suspended from Park Elementary School after biting his strawberry pop tart into a shape that teachers thought looked like a gun. In 2013, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended from school for shooting an imaginary bow-and-arrow with his hands. Despite the common occurrence of these so-called zero-tolerance policies being implemented by schools to discourage weapons-use, Mohamed’s incident is the only one to receive this sort of global attention.

Perhaps, instead of hailing Mohamed as a hero and labeling his teachers as racists, changes should be made in the state and school policies which narrate these actions. If teachers were not trained to call the police over anything that is “intended to cause anyone to be alarmed,” Mohamed would not have been arrested in the first place. State laws and administrative policies must be reformed to allow teachers to handle these situations by themselves without involving police authority or implementing serious punishment. Perhaps common sense should trump political correctness, regardless of the victim’s race. It is not a case of racial profiling; it is an effect of misguided administrative policies.

This generation’s populous has access to the global spotlight more readily than any before, and it is time that America’s youth starts searching for real news, instead of blindly yielding to the whims of left-wing propaganda.