Right wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from entering Australia after saying Friday that attacks like the recent massacre in New Zealand happen because the establishment “mollycoddles extremist Leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures.”
“Milo Yiannopoulos will not be allowed to enter Australia for his proposed tour this year. Mr Yiannopoulos’ comments on social media regarding the Christchurch terror attack are appalling and foment hatred and division,” Australia’s Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs David Coleman said in a statement Saturday.
“The terrorist attack in Christchurch was carried out on Muslims peacefully practicing their religion. It was an act of pure evil. Australia stands with New Zealand and with Muslim communities the world over in condemning this inhuman act,” his statement added.
A gunman opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, killing 49 people and injuring more than a dozen others. The Australian-born person claiming responsibility for the attacks said he went to New Zealand solely to commit the attack, and that he used guns specifically to cause discord over the Second Amendment in the United States, according to the New York Times.
The decision from Australia came after a Friday post from Yiannopoulos on Facebook in which the former Breitbart editor said attacks like those at the Christchurch mosques are provoked by establishments “pandering” to extremists on the left.
Milo declined a request for comment from TheWrap, but in a series of social media posts he decried the decision, saying it was once again an assault on his free speech rights.
“I explicitly denounced violence. I said that we on the Right are always disavowing racists. I pointed out the inconvenient fact that it is Leftists committing the majority of political violence. And I criticized the establishment for pandering to Islamic fundamentalism. So Australia banned me again,” he said on Instagram. “Coleman and his party deserve to be annihilated at the next election for their betrayal of such fundamental western values as free speech and for cravenly folding to pressure from the Left. And I suspect that electoral annihilation is exactly what’s about to happen.”
Coleman originally approved Yiannopoulos’ entry into the country for a speaking tour before elections in May, overriding the concerns of the country’s Department of Home Affairs, according to News Corp Australia. A 2017 visit from Milo to the suburbs of Melbourne led to violent protests.
Once a scourge of U.S. college campuses, Yiannopoulos largely faded from public view after being banned from Twitter. In February 2017, he resigned his position at Breitbart after multiple past remarks surfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia. A separate independent media venture from Yiannopoulos also ended in failure.