Let's start with the basic premise that's gotten so many millions of rightwingers fired up: This kid and his family had to be up to something nefarious, be it actual terrorism or the "mind-terrorism" of running a scam to drum up sympathy, because they're Muslim. That's the premise, and it's not hidden in all those billions of words trying to build a case against a 14 year old kid. Everything flows from that premise. That article you linked is pretty much typical of the genre, the classic slimy format of "just askin' questions" that amount to smears, based entirely on what we (the right-thinking reader) just know must be true of those damn muslins.

The most typical comment of all boils down to "it sure do look like a bomb to me", they all nod sagely, and Ahmed Mohamed is therefore a terrorist.

I do hate to step into the swamp of arguing about the sincerely held beliefs of rightwingers, but I think this poor kid deserves a defense this one time.

That linked article showcased the common smear that "he didn't build that!". "It's not an 'invention'!". Well, actually, this 14 year old showed more inventiveness in his science project than I did in mine at that age. What he did was combine a clock kit with a backup battery and a few switches, and put it into an old pencil case he had laying around, and called that novel combination of junk that had never existed before his "invention". And for a 14-year old, that sure as hell is an invention.

When I was his age and needed to come up with something for a school science project, I just threw together this thing based on an article I'd recently read in Popular Science or some publication like that. It was a 10 by 10 matrix of neon lights, wired to two rotary switches, one below and one to the right, in such a way that a single bulb would light up when its row and column had been selected by the two switches. Number the positions on the switches 1 through 10, and scrawl the numbers 1 through 100 next to the lights, and shazzam! that 14 year old had invented a computer! Yay me! And they called me a "mathematical genius", I kid you not.

Betcha Ahmed was shooting about that high, but his skin and religion condemned him to suspicion, arrest, and notoriety instead. But it seems to have turned out ok for him, in the end, as long as he ignores the screeching on the right side of the Internet.