Australia cancels visa of Israeli influencer accused of ‘spreading hatred’
Social media influencer Sammy Yahood is known to spread Islamophobic content online.
Australia has cancelled the visa of an Israeli social media influencer who has campaigned against Islam, saying it will not accept visitors to the country who come to spread hatred.
Australian Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke said in a statement on Tuesday that “spreading hatred is not a good reason to come” to Australia, hours after influencer Sammy Yahood announced that his visa was cancelled three hours before his flight departed from Israel.
People who want to visit Australia should apply for the correct visa and come for the right reasons, Burke said in a statement to the AFP news agency.
Just hours before his visa was cancelled, Yahood had written on X, “Islam ACCORDING TO ISLAM does not tolerate non-believers, apostates, women’s rights, children’s rights, or gay rights.”
He also referred to Islam as a “disgusting ideology” and an “aggressor”.
Australia tightened its hate crime laws earlier this month in response to a mass shooting at a Jewish celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which left 15 people dead.
In a recent post, Yahood, a native of the UK and a recent citizen of Israel, had also advocated for the deportation of United States Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American, who is Muslim.
In another, he ridiculed the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which is responsible for coordinating relief for Palestinians and Palestinian refugees in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Israel began bulldozing UNRWA’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem last week, a move strongly condemned by the world body and Palestinian leaders, who said the flattening of the site marked a “barbaric new era” of unchecked defiance of international law by Israeli authorities.
Despite the cancellation of his visa to Australia, Yahood said he flew from Israel to Abu Dhabi, but was blocked from getting his connecting flight to Melbourne.
“I have been unlawfully banned from Australia, and I will be taking action,” he wrote on X.
“This is a story about tyranny, censorship and control,” he added in another post.
Yahood’s visa was reportedly cancelled under the same legislation that has been used in the past to reject people’s visas on the grounds of disseminating hatred.
Sky News Australia reported that Minister Burke previously revoked the visitor visa of Israeli-American activist and tech entrepreneur Hillel Fuld over his “Islamophobic rhetoric”, as well as the visa of Simcha Rothman, a lawmaker with Israel’s far-right Mafdal-Religious Zionism party and a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, amid concerns that his planned speaking tour in the country would “spread division”.
The conservative Australian Jewish Association, which had invited Yahood to speak at events in Sydney and Melbourne, said it “strongly condemned” the visa decision by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government.
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