Australian Politician Sacked for Anti-Muslim Rant

Victorian Liberal candidate Jeremy Hearn. (AAP Image/Facebook)

A Victorian Liberal Party candidate for the federal election has been dumped over an “appalling” anti-Muslim rant.

Jeremy Hearn, who was contesting the seat of Isaacs in Melbourne’s southeast, was cut adrift on the morning of May 1.

“There is no place in the party for people with these views,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told the Herald Sun.

Hearn apologised overnight for saying that Muslims are people of “bad character” who should be denied Australian citizenship.

In comments on a magazine article, he also accused Muslims of wanting sharia law in Australia and called for taxpayers to stop funding Islamic schools.

“Those comments were entirely wrong and I apologise unreservedly for them,” he told AAP on Tuesday night.

The one-line apology was not enough to save Hearn, with Victorian Liberal Party officials moving to cancel his endorsement.

Senior Victorian Liberal MP Alan Tudge lashed his offensive remarks.

“Those views don’t represent the views of the Liberal Party,” the minister told Sky News.

Labor holds the seat of Isaacs, which includes suburbs such as Dandenong South, Chelsea, Braeside, and Mordialloc, by 2.3 percent.

US Muslim Leads the Way in Preventing Radicalisation

An American Muslim is encouraging his fellow Muslims to help prevent radicalisation by standing-up and opposing the Islamist establishment, which claims to speak on behalf of all those of Muslim faith.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim and physician, believes that Muslims have a role to play in standing up to the current Islamist establishments to help prevent radicalization, he told 2GB Radio on March 12.

“Radicalisation is a long process,” Jasser said. “The beginning process is a separatism where groups, leaders, imams start to tell our communities that this country is against them, that they’re victims.”

“They become basically estranged. Then that separatism consciously turns into a sense of trying to find redemption … and they develop a cause that they want to die for, which is jihad.”

Jasser has met many Muslims who have a high moral standard and even reject some of the theocracy.

Unfortunately, they have remained silent while those with a radical interpretation of Islam have moved into positions of authority.

“They have not developed publishing houses, they have not developed a sense of courage, if you will, to stand up against,” he said. “They are sort of like the silent Germans in Germany that did not adopt Nazism but did very little to fight the establishment of the regime.”

Jasser said these establishments have created a monolithic interpretation of Islam that is dominating mosques even in the West.

“The texts, the publishing companies, the interpretations, and translations of the Qur’an and versions of the Ḥadīth, which is the stories of the prophet, are really monolithic. They come from either Saudi Arabia’s theocracy or Al-Azhar University in Cairo, or the Khomeini in Iran, so that simple establishment is the problem,” he said.

“As an American, we talk about President Trump fighting the establishment, which is the swamp. If you use the same analogy in the Islamic world, the clerics, the imams, the governments are all this establishment which is a power structure that controls, through billions of what I call Petro-Islam spread around the world, has created a very monolithic interpretation of Islam.”

The antidote to this is to “develop a new Sharia,” he said, “a new Islamic interpretation of law that’s in the 21st Century.

“That new school of thought is going to have to be done by imams that are schooled in Sharia but that can’t happen overnight.”

Jasser said that just as Muslims had taken on Bid’ahs or inventions, like science and new computer technology, he believes the Islamic world can also take on new political science to reform Sharia law.

Epoch Times reporter Richard Szabo contributed to this report