[PJMedia] A district court judge in Texas has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed on his own behalf and on behalf of his 15-year-old son, Ahmed Mohamed
| ...a very common name in our archives, but this one is a.k.a. Clock Boy... |
They had sued Fox News, Glenn Beck, and the mayor of Irving -- among others -- for defamation in September of 2016.
A year earlier, Ahmed, then a 14-year-old freshman at an Irving, Texas, high school, was arrested, briefly detained by police, and suspended for three days after bringing to school a "cool clock" that looked like a briefcase bomb. Ahmed claimed to have "invented" the easily assembled clock, and that he had brought it to school to show it to his shop teacher.
The incident led many to question the Mohamed family's motives. Newly appointed District Court Judge Maricela Moore dismissed the lawsuit following a nearly three-hour hearing on Monday, according to the American Freedom Law Center:
The motion to dismiss was filed by lawyers from the American Freedom Law Center (“AFLC”) and local counsel Pete Rowe on behalf of the Center for Security Policy (“CSP”) and Jim Hanson, two of the defendants in the defamation case, which also named as defendants the local Fox affiliate, Glenn Beck, and Beck’s production company.
Mohamed had sued Hanson and CSP for statements Hanson had made on Beck’s program about the connection between the Clock Boy hoax bomb affair, the attendant media frenzy created in large part by his father Mohamed, civilization jihad, and the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations (“CAIR”), the Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front group in the United States that promotes civilization jihad.
During the hearing, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel David Yerushalmi explained to Judge Moore that the purpose of the lawfare-driven lawsuit was to intimidate into silence those who might comment publicly on the connection between jihad, terrorism, sharia, and Islam. As such, Yerushalmi argued, "this case is a classic Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or ‘SLAPP’ case and should be dismissed.”
During the lengthy hearing, Judge Moore pressed Mohamed’s lawyer, Fort Worth attorney Susan Hutchison, to provide any facts that would suggest that Hanson and the other defendants had said anything false or defamatory about Mohamed or his son during the television broadcasts. After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Moore said that she would rule by the end of the day. On Tuesday, the court published Judge Moore’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit against Hanson and CSP with prejudice. |