US teacher 'urged people to vote for Donald Trump so Muslims could be butchered'

Publicly visible posts on his Facebook page included a sequence of outbursts which described Islam in a hateful manner

US President-elect Donald Trump PHOTO: REUTERS

A teacher in the US has been severely criticised for stirring anti-Muslim sentiment on his Facebook page during the 2016 election.

Dan Close, a history teacher and athletics coach at Dewey High School in Oklahoma, asked people to vote for Donald Trump so Muslims would be “butchered”.

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Publicly visible posts on his Facebook page also included a sequence of outbursts which described Islam in a hateful manner and same-sex marriage as “a sin against nature”. One of the posts by the teacher ascribed a terror attack to Islam.

"Vote for Clinton if you want to appease the dog pigs. Vote Trump if you want them butchered. Happy Ramadan to all infidels," one post read.

Other posts on the page called Hillary Clinton “pantsuited beast”, Barack Obama, the “Imam-in-chief” living in the “White Mosque” and one claimed Michelle Obama was not female.

A former student of Close said: “I knew his political leaning and there was definitely a bias in that he made it very clear which political side he was on.”


“Close was a good teacher but had a “political fire” in him that was “definitely skewed towards the right”, he asserted.

The Facebook posts were first discovered by a retired teacher from Oklahoma City, Paula Washington, who reported them to the local public school.

Speaking to the school’s superintendent Vince Vincent, Washington said, “I told him how objectionable it was. I told him how a teacher has an obligation to express facts — especially a history teacher, to teach facts without opinion.”

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“The vitriol and the complete hatred that he had shown on his Facebook page had not only been seen by his students, but students all over the country.”

“Had it not been associated with his work, I would support his First Amendment rights, but I also know he represents the educational system for which he works, and I couldn’t mesh the two." She added.

The school did not wish to comment on the matter reports The Independent.

This article originally appeared on Independent
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