Political activist Candace Owens in the spin room at the Fiserv Forum following the first Republican presidential primary debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23, 2023. Photo: Chris Dilts/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Far-right American political commentator and content creator Candace Owens addressed Australia’s decision to deny her a visa and ban her from entering the country in Tuesday’s episode of her podcast “Candace.”

Australia’s Immigration Minister Tony Burke canceled Owens’s visa this past weekend, which prevents her from doing five live speaking events scheduled for November in Australia and New Zealand. Owens, 35, was expected to have her first ever Australia and New Zealand tour, with stops in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Auckland. Speaking to a local news outlet, Burke said he made the decision to deny Owens a visa because she has the “capacity to incite discord in almost every direction.”

“From downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about [Nazi doctor and war criminal Josef] Mengele through to claims that Muslims started slavery, Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” Burke said. “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”

Owens and organizers of her speaking tour in Australia will be filing a legal appeal to a federal judge in response to Burke’s decision.

The “Candace” podcast host described Burke’s move as a “petty act of vandalism” on Tuesday and partially attributed his decision to the alleged influence of the global “Zionist media empire.”

“What you are seeing really take shape is that people don’t want me to get in front of an audience,” she added. “We all know what actually happened in Australia, [which is] really the story of me and this year: that I am not comfortable with the amount of death that is taking place in Palestine.”

“And the Zionist media empire is very powerful all around the world and they essentially say, ‘If you do not count out or at least stay mum, so you gotta be out there pretending that you don’t see all the Palestinian children being blown up and killed. You can choose silence or you can choose support,'” Owens continued. “But you cannot be reasonable and say, ‘I’m not OK or comfortable with that amount of death’ – and that’s where I’m at. I’ve made my bed and I’ve chosen to lie in it.”

Owens has made a series of antisemitic and controversial comments about Israel, Jews, and the Holocaust on social media and her podcast, as well as in interviews. She has downplayed the atrocities of the Holocaust and said medical experiments by Mengele performed on Jews during World War II sounded “like bizarre propaganda.” She has also said she believes the Star of David originated from an evil pagan deity and claimed the US “is being held hostage by Israel.”

Owens has also suggested Israel was behind the assassination of former US President John F Kennedy and called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons … child sacrifice,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. She has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews and Zionists and in September falsely claimed that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late spiritual leader of the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement who was also known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, “preached Jewish supremacism.”

Burke made it clear that he would reject Owens’s application for a visa even before she applied for one. He said in August, “tickets to these events are selling for $100. I hope she has a good refund policy. There hasn’t been an application for a visa, but if there is, the brief will come to me personally. My opposition to antisemitism and Islamophobia has always been on the record. I have clear legal powers to knock back a visa to anyone who would incite discord.”

During Tuesday’s episode of her podcast, Owens denied Burke’s claims about her inciting “discord” and said “of course it’s not true.”

“Nothing said is true … All of this is just to make a statement to try to present me as some very scary person akin to Adolf Hitler and we’ve seen this before,” she claimed. She then talked about being penalized for not staying silent about how the ongoing Israel-Hamas war is affecting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“The determined punishment for me for not turning a blind eye to this, for not being a coward and pretending that I just don’t see it, has been harassment; has been that I’m going to take away your money, and I’m going to ruin your reputation and I’m going to have journalists who are Zionists try to assassinate your character online,” she said. “I have accepted that because I think that is a way easier punishment to accept than what these [Palestinian] children are accepting on a daily basis.”