Every once in a while there's some good news:
On Thursday afternoon a Texas Judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro by Mohamed Mohamed, the father of "clock boy" Ahmed Mohammed.
Claiming defamation, Mohammed filed the lawsuit in October 2015 after Shapiro made an appearance on The Kelly File questioning Ahmed's story and motives surrounding a clock he brought to school that looked like a bomb. Ahmed was detained by police for the "clock" and was suspended. His family, who has ties to foreign regimes sponsoring terrorism, and CAIR promptly accused the school of Islamophobia and racial profiling.
The brief order didn't state a a reason for the abrupt dismissal of Mohammed's lawsuit, but it did order him to pay all of of Shapiro's court costs and attorney's fees–within 14 days.
Shapiro had discussed on Fox News the possible motives that young Ahmed and his family might have had when they accused his Texas school district of religious profiling and discrimination when they detained him for bringing the bomb lookalike to school. That's called exercising your free-speech rights–and the Texas court obviously agreed.
As you might recall, young Ahmed became a liberal hero after his brief detention on Sept. 14, 2015. Then-President Obama invited him to the White House for Astronomy night and gave him a hug and a shoutout: ""We have to watch for and cultivate and encourage those glimmers of curiosity and possibility, not suppress them, not squelch them."
Meanwhile the youth's father, a Sudanese immigrant, hired a lawyer and demanded $15 million in damages for discrimination against the city of Irving, Texas, whose police had made the arrest, and the school district where the event occurred. But then Mohamed Mohamed abruptly moved the entire family to Qatar, which had offered young Ahmed a scholarship.
Soon enough, though, in June 2016, they were right back in Irving, claiming they missed their relatives who had settled in the area. And in September 2016, the elder Mohamed filed a massive defamation lawsuit against an array of conservative media and media figures, including Fox News and Glenn Beck as well as Shapiro. The conservatives had speculated that he had set up the clock incident as a way to draw publicity to his son. Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne was also named a defendant.
The defendants claimed that the libel action was a classic SLAPP suit–using expensive defamation litigation as "lawfare" to silence one's critics. And Texas District Judge Mariela Moore apparently agreed. Starting in December she began dismissing all the defendants from the suit (Shapiro and Van Duyne were among the last) and ordering Mohamed to pay their attorney's fees under Texas SLAPP law.
Mohamed has vowed to appeal the dismissals–but perhaps he'll move his family to Qatar again instead.