Obama just tweeted the perfect message for Ahmed Mohamed

President Obama had the perfect message for Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving, Texas, ninth-grader who made a clock, brought it into school to show off to his engineering teacher, and was arrested on suspicion of making a bomb.

“Cool clock, Ahmed,” the president tweeted. “We should inspire more kids like you to like science.”

That’s how you respond to a 14-year-old who builds an exciting project on his own time and brings it to school to show off what he made. You show him that creativity opens doors, that having passion and making things are a path to opportunity and excitement. You tell him that even the president is excited by what he has to offer this country.

You don’t handcuff him and take him to be fingerprinted at a juvenile detention center, suspend him from school, and threaten to charge him with making a “hoax bomb.”

Hopefully Ahmed Mohamed, and other kids like him, will pay more attention to the president’s message than to the small-minded prejudice of the Irving, Texas, high school and police department.