Incendiary rapper Ye, who was formerly known as Kanye West, has had his visa cancelled in Australia over a recent song release titled “Heil Hitler.”
The announcement came Wednesday after Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said officials had reviewed his visa status following the controversial song’s release in May.
Ye is currently married to Bianca Censori, an Australian architect, and had been “coming to Australia for a long time,” Burke told national broadcaster ABC on Wednesday. “He’s got family here and he’s made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again.”
“It wasn’t a visa for the purpose of concerts. It was a lower level and the officials still looked at the law and said you’re going to have a song and promote that sort of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia,” Burke said of the visa cancellation.
“We have enough problems in this country already without deliberately importing bigotry,” Burke continued.
The announcement comes as Australia faces an increase in antisemitic incidents. In Australia last year, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, there were 1,713 antisemitic incidents, compared to 1,200 in 2023.
Last December, a synagogue in suburban Melbourne, Australia was set ablaze and two synagogues in Sydney were defaced with swastikas and other antisemitic language in January.
Following the release of the song — which includes the chorus line “All my n****s Nazis, n***a, heil Hitler” — Ye appeared to repent for his previous antisemitism.
In May, the morning after the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington D.C., the rapper took to X to say he was “done with antisemitism.”
Ye’s Australian visa cancellation also follows the cancellation of the U.S. visas for Bob Vylan, a British punk band that led thousands of concert-goers at the Glastonbury music festival in chanting “Death, death to the IDF” last weekend.
Far-right pundit Candace Owens also faced visa cancellations from Australia and New Zealand last fall, with Australia rejecting her request for a visa over remarks in which she denied Nazi medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
