OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:41 PM – Monday, October 28, 2024
Ahead of a scheduled speaking tour, conservative commentator Candace Owens has been prohibited from visiting Australia.
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During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Owens expanded her platform and touted herself as a “rare Black conservative voice.” She was also a co-founder of BLEXIT in 2018, a group that calls on Black Americans to abandon the Democrat Party.
Nevertheless, Owens has faced condemnation from those in her own community as well. She once told a crowd, “I can’t think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But Black people always want to talk to me about slavery,” which prompted criticism from a number of Black American political commentators.
Owens’ visa application was denied by Australia’s Minister of Home Affairs, Tony Burke, Newsweek reported.
“From downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about [Nazi doctor Josef Mengele] through to claims that Muslims started slavery, Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” Burke said in a statement.
“Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else,” he added.
Owens’ “divisive” remarks regarding Israel have similarly fueled controversy. She was hit with more criticism in July when she claimed that stories about Mengele’s Nazi medical tests on twins in concentration camps sounded like “bizarre propaganda” and “completely absurd,” seemingly insinuating that she doesn’t believe it ever happened or downplaying the severity of the acts.
The comments were made by Owens on her program.
Owens was previously a well-known figure at the conservative news outlet The Daily Wire, but she was let go in early 2024 after reportedly butting heads with Jewish co-founder Ben Shapiro in regards to antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas war.
Owens also just recently converted to Catholicism this year, which is what her husband, George Farmer, the founder of the Parler app, identifies as too. Owens is a former reformed evangelical Protestant, but some social media users have theorized that she converted to Catholicism, not only because her husband holds the same ideals, but also since evangelical Protestants tend to be more supportive of Israel and the Jewish people.
“Recent surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life demonstrate that American evangelical Protestants have distinctive — and highly positive — attitudes towards the state of Israel,” stated the Pew Forum.
Additionally, one writer at the American Enterprise Institute, a “public policy think tank dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world,” according to its website, had some words to say about Owens’ newfound frustration towards Israel.
“She [Candace] has emerged as a loud and ill-informed critic of the State of Israel, one whose views would be far more at home on the progressive left than among most Republicans and conservatives, who support Israel,” the think tank argued.
the Anti-Defamation Commission, a Jewish Australian community organization originally founded by B’nai B’rith, chimed in as well and cheered on Burke’s choice to reject her application.
“This is a victory for truth, for decency, and for the millions of Jewish souls and millions of others whose memory she so shamelessly desecrated,” the group’s chairman, Dvir Abramovich, stated. “The decision by the government to bar Owens sends a resounding message: Australia has no place for those who mock the suffering of genocide survivors and insult the memories of the 6 million Jews who perished. This is a line in the sand.”
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