By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

CHESAPEAKE, Va. – A Virginia teacher has been charged with assault – and was reportedly fired – for allegedly causing injury to a 10-year-old student while trying to teach the girl an Islamic hand signal.

Tara Harris, the teacher at Butts Road Intermediate School in Chesapeake, had been teaching Islamic religious hand signals to her students for two days when the incident occurred, according to Stephanie Bennett, the student’s mother.

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But Bennett’s daughter suffers from a “processing disorder” that makes it difficult for her to quickly grasp concepts like hand signals, her mother said. When the girl repeatedly failed to properly make the Islamic signal for “power and strength,” Harris allegedly became angry and tried to twist her fingers into the correct sign, and injured the student in the process.

“When she didn’t get it right, (Harris) went over and yanked her hand out of her desk and my daughter’s hand got hung up on the metal wire of her file folder and the skin got caught on it,” Bennett told the website. “The other children saw my daughter’s hand dripping with blood after the teacher had gotten so mad that she went to twist my daughter’s hand into an Islamic sign.”

Bennett claims Harris has  a habit of reciting Islamic prayers about five times a day in front of students, teaches the children that the Islamic faith is superior to other religions, and openly campaigns for President Obama in the classroom.

The mother says she was first told by school authorities that Harris had been put on administrative leave following the incident, then was later told she’d been fired. That information could not be confirmed by the website news report.

Harris was charged with simple assault and released on a summons, according to police officials.