Some reports suggest that disgraced rapper Kanye West is planning a trip to Australia alongside Bianca Censori, the Australian Yeezy employee he is said to have married in an unofficial ceremony earlier this month.
Numerous Australian news outlets have published that West will visit the country to meet Censori’s family in Melbourne. Now though, Dvir Abramovich, the chairman of the Australian-Jewish organisation the Anti-Defamation Commission, has called for the rapper to be denied entry into the country due to the string of notorious antisemitic remarks he made last year.
In a statement shared with the NME today (January 23rd), Abramovich and his organisation – which was founded with the central aim of quashing antisemitism in Australia – are urging the country’s Immigration Minister, Andrew Giles, to stop West from entering.
Under section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act, a traveller from overseas can be refused entry via “the character test”. This means that someone can fail the test if their conduct leads the Immigration Minister to deem them “not of good character”.
The Anti-Defamation Commission argue that West’s antisemitic comments from last year would stand as a failure of the character test. They specifically use his tweet from October as an example, which claimed he would be “going death con 3 on Jewish people“. This led to his account being suspended.
The organisation also referred to West’s October interview on Drink Champs, where he made further inflammatory comments about the “Jewish media”. He claimed that Jewish people “owned the Black voice” and would “take us and milk us [until] we die”.
Understandably, the Anti-Defamation Commission also noted West’s widely-condemned interview on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars in December. In it, he praised Adolf Hitler and said, “I am a Nazi”. He also denied the Holocaust, erroneously claiming that it was “factually incorrect” that six million Jewish people lost their lives during it.
“Calling for violence and hate must have consequences, and Australia should not put out the welcome mat and provide a platform to a hatemonger who spews threats against the Jewish community and peddles conspiracy myths about Jewish power, greed and control,” Abramovich commented.
