Hate crime: US teacher assualts 5-yr-old ‘Muslim’ boy

A five-year-old Muslim kindergarten student was allegedly assaulted by a woman teacher, who grabbed him by the neck and began choking him. This is one of the latest in a series of hate incidents reported in the US, following Donald Trump’s win.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, has called for a probe into what it said were assaults by a woman teacher on the kindergarten student at a Charlotte-Mecklenburg elementary school in North Carolina. The assaults at the David Cox Road Elementary School in North Charlotte started at the beginning of the school year, according to CAIR, but the latest incident occurred last week, the Charlotte Observer reported.

“During the first two months of the school year, (the student) was subjected to relentless bullying and harassment not only by his classmates, but by (the teacher),” Maha Sayed, a civil rights lawyer for the organisation, wrote to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. For example, the teacher routinely singled out the student from his classmates and made him carry a heavy backpack throughout the day, Sayed wrote. She “would also treat him harshly and reportedly called him ‘bad Muslim boy’ on multiple occasions,” it said.

The teacher who reportedly discriminated against the student was named by the New York Daily News as Alma Simpson. The group wants the student transferred “to a safe kindergarten classroom free from discrimination and retaliatory actions.”