Ye, the rapper formerly often known as Kanye West, has been barred from entering Australia following the discharge of his pro-Nazi song Heil Hitler.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Ye had been travelling for years to Australia, where his wife, Bianca Censori, was born. Her family lives in Melbourne.
Burke said Heil Hitler promotes Nazism. The song, released in May, has been criticized as an antisemitic tribute to German dictator Adolf Hitler. It’s also been banned in Germany and from online platforms including Apple Music, YouTube and Spotify.
The song features a direct sample from a speech Hitler gave in 1935 and repeats the slogan hailing the German dictator.
“He’s been coming to Australia for a very long time. He’s got family here. And he’s made plenty of offensive comments that my officials checked out again once he released the Heil Hitler song and he now not has a sound visa in Australia,” Burke told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“When you’re going to have a song and promote that type of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia,” Burke added. “We’ve enough problems on this country already without deliberately importing bigotry.”
He noted that the Australian government had not banned Ye from entering Australia permanently because “every visa application gets reassessed by my officials every time.”
“I’m not taking away the way in which the act operates, but even for the bottom level of visa, when my officials checked out it, they cancelled that following the announcement of that song,” he added.
Australia’s Migration Act sets security and character requirements for non-citizens to enter the country.
A spokesperson for the house affairs department told the Guardian Australia that the “government will proceed to act decisively to guard the community from the chance of harm posed by individuals who select to have interaction in criminal activity or behaviour of concern, including visa cancellation or refusal where appropriate.”
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Ye and his representatives haven’t commented on the visa revocation.
This isn’t the primary time Australia has considered blocking West from entering the country. In 2023, Australia’s education minister, Jason Clare, condemned Ye’s “awful” antisemitic comments involving Hitler and the Holocaust, saying others who’ve made similar statements have been denied visas.
“People like that who’ve applied for visas to get into Australia up to now have been rejected,” Clare told CNN affiliate Nine News in January 2023. “I expect that if he does apply he would should undergo the identical process and answer the identical questions that they did.”
Ye has a years-long history of constructing antisemitic remarks.
Earlier this 12 months, West’s Yeezy.com was faraway from Shopify after it featured a single product: white T-shirts with a black swastika within the centre, under the product name HH-01.
In an announcement to Global News, a Shopify spokesperson said, “All merchants are chargeable for following the foundations of our platform. This merchant didn’t engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify.”
In February, West used his X account to share his controversial and antisemitic thoughts, including identifying as a Nazi and claiming to “love Hitler.” On Feb. 9, it appeared that West had deactivated his X account for a brief period of time before reactivating it.
He was also dropped by his talent agency, 33&West, following his antisemitic rants on X.
Daniel McCartney, the rapper’s former music agent, announced that West had been faraway from the agency’s roster of clients as of Feb. 10.
“Effective immediately, I’m now not representing YE (F/K/A Kanye West) because of his harmful and hateful remarks that myself nor 33 & West can stand for,” McCartney wrote in an Instagram Stories post.
“Peace and like to all.”
The Anti-Defamation League also released an announcement with regard to West’s recent posts and his website, writing, “As if we would have liked further proof of Kanye’s antisemitism, he selected to place a single item on the market on his website – a t-shirt emblazoned with a swastika.”
“The swastika is the symbol adopted by Hitler as the first emblem of the Nazis. It galvanized his followers within the twentieth century and continues to threaten and instill fear in those targeted by antisemitism and white supremacy,” the post continued.
“If that wasn’t enough, the t-shirt is labeled on Kanye’s website as ‘HH-01,’ which is code for ‘Heil Hitler.’
“Kanye was tweeting vile antisemitism nonstop since last week. There’s no excuse for this sort of behavior. Even worse, Kanye advertised his website through the Super Bowl, amplifying it beyond his already massive social media audience.”
— With files from The Associated Press
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