Australia ‘the destination of choice for hate preachers’

The government has been accused of allowing Australia to become ‘a destination of choice for anti-Semites’.

Holocaust denier David Icke.

British Holocaust ­denier David Icke looks set to go ahead with a national speaking tour, as the government is accused of allowing Australia to become “a destination of choice for anti-Semites”.

Requests to cancel Mr Icke’s visa were sent to Immigration Minister David Coleman in January by Josh Burns, a Labor candidate in an electorate with a large Jewish population, and Dvir Abramovich, a Jewish community leader, but no action has been taken.

Mr Icke is known for claiming Jewish people funded the Holocaust, while at the same time campaigning to have Holocaust denial taught on school curriculums — views that caused his publisher to abandon him in 1995.

He claims the world is run by an Illuminati of lizard people, and that the Jewish Rothschild family is among its leaders.

Mr Icke has said he strongly believes that “a small Jewish clique … worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War”, as well as the global financial crisis in 2008 and the September 11 attacks.

Mr Burns, the preselected Labor candidate for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, said the government had failed to act. “The Morrison government is allowing Australia to become a destination of choice for Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and far-right hate preachers,” he said.

“Peter Dutton, David Coleman and Scott Morrison are running a false scare campaign about border security, but they have nothing to say about letting anti-Semitic hate preachers and Holocaust deniers into the country to profit off racism.”

In his letter to Mr Coleman, Mr Burns wrote that “fighting ­racism and anti-Semitism should be something all political parties are united on”.

Since making his letter to Mr Coleman public, Mr Burns — who is Jewish and whose family escaped Nazi Germany — has received online anti-Semitic abuse.

Mr Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, said: “Australia should not throw open its doors and put out the welcome mat to a hate-preacher who spews anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

“His visit would only bolster extremist sentiment and may give rise to violence.”

A spokeswoman from the ­Department of Home Affairs said it did not comment on individual cases.

Tickets to Mr Icke’s events are still being sold ahead of the Everything You Need to Know tour that begins on March 1 in Melbourne — a city home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of ­Israel.

An organiser of Mr Icke’s tour told The Australian that his visa had been granted and it was “business as usual”.

The calls to cancel Mr Icke’s visa come as Polish shock jock Stanislaw Michalkiewicz — criticised by the Vatican for claiming Jewish victims of the Holocaust seeking compensation for seized property were trying to “outmanoeuvre Poles out of $65 billion” — continues his Australian speaking tour. Labor legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus said ­allowing Michalkiewicz and Mr Icke into the country was “completely unacceptable”.