Australia has canceled the visa of an Israeli influencer over his controversial verbal attacks against Islam, report news media.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke cancelled the visa of Sammy Yahood hours before his flight to Australia, according to Sky News.

He was scheduled to visit Australia and speak at major events in Sydney and Melbourne.

• READ MORE: Australia cancels visa of Israeli influencer accused of ‘spreading hatred’
• Federal government’s crackdown on free speech affects all Australians

However, the Australian government cancelled his visa over his controversial remarks against Islam, saying it would not accept visitors who come to “spread hatred”.

Yahood flew to Abu Dhabi anyway, but was blocked from getting his connecting flight.

Australia tightened its hate crime laws this month in response to a December 14 mass shooting on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach that killed 15 people.

Yahood’s visa was reportedly cancelled under the same legislation that has been used in the past to reject people’s visas on hatred grounds.

“Islamophobic rhetoric”
The conservative Australian Jewish Association, which had invited the influencer to speak, said it “strongly condemned” the visa decision by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government.

The Australian government previously revoked the visa of Israeli tech entrepreneur Hillel Fuld in June last year over “Islamophobic rhetoric”.

In August, Canberra also cancelled the visa of far-right Israeli politician Simcha Rothman, who supported plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza and called Palestinian children Israel’s “enemies”.

COMMENTARY: By Walden Bello

When the Flores and Velasco articles and posts whitewashing Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza first came out a few days ago, I was waiting for people in the Philippine media to criticise and denounce them since they were so obviously hack pieces that did not meet the minimal standards of decent journalism.

I waited and waited, until I realised that there were no media people or organisations that were going to speak up.

Where were the progressive and liberal voices, apart from those of Richard Heydarian and Inday Espina Varona?

• READ MORE: The betrayal of Palestinian journalists
• Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Other reports on the Israeli war on Gaza media bias

This was the reason I felt compelled to issue the statement condemning the sordid reporting of Flores (The Philippine Star) and Velasco (Daily Tribune).

I was not out to do an expose, but that’s what it effectively became. In my subsequent posts, I raised the question of what was the reason just two journalists were willing to challenge the stories.

Was it a case of circling the wagons to protect errant colleagues? Was it fear of ties with the Israeli state being exposed by the Israelis in retaliation? Was it fear of physical or political reprisals by the Israelis?

These may have played a part, but the deafening silence meant there was something bigger at work.

This morning I received a long text from a prominent media practitioner that provided the answer. It’s not fear. It’s actually worse: agreement with Zionist ideology and policies, including genocide.

That the person asked me not to divulge his name for fear of suffering retribution from his colleagues stunned me. OMG, is this how deep the rot is with our media? ? Here is his disconcerting revelation to me:

‘Most are prejudiced’
“Yes some are scared, but honestly most of them actually are prejudiced against Muslims and side with the Zionists anytime.

“Most believe in the US religious fascist Zionist narrative, and also cannot accept that the world has changed — that the US is no longer the unipower it was decades ago, and that Russia, China, India and BRICS are on the rise.

“And also, you should hear them talk about how Filipino Muslims should be wiped off the face of the earth.

“These are college graduates from UP [University of the Philippines], UST [University of Santo Tomas], Ateneo who studied media.

“Whenever I would voice empathy for the Muslim minority here, or Palestinians, I’d be called stupid. Same also because I refused to join in the corruption.

“Oh, and also they have the same prejudice against China and the Chinese and mistake the Japanese imperial army atrocities as something China did to us!

“Also this is not limited to media. I have batchmates from UP Diliman, medical doctors, lawyers, engineers who also have the same prejudices.”

He added: “Some of these journalists have won awards abroad.”

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

So here we are, 2025, and Israel has finally achieved what no terrorist group, no hostile neighbour, no antisemitic tyrant ever could: it has become the most dangerous country on earth — for its own people.

Not because of rockets or boycotts, but because its government has decided that the only way to secure the future is to annihilate everyone else’s.

The Zionist project — once sold as a miraculous refuge for a persecuted people — now stands revealed as a 70‑year experiment in ethnic cleansing, wrapped in biblical entitlement and armed with American money.

• READ MORE: No let-up in Israeli attacks as world condemns man-made famine in Gaza
• Rallies across NZ honour Gaza Strip journalists, condemn own news media
• Other war on Gaza reports

The current phase? Bulldozers in the West Bank, tanks in Gaza, and a prime minister whose personal survival depends on keeping his citizens permanently terrified and morally anesthetised.

Netanyahu and his coalition of zealots have at last clarified Israel’s mission statement: kill or expel two million Palestinians, and call it “security.”

Reduce Gaza to rubble, herd the survivors into tents, and then — here’s the punchline — offer them “resettlement packages” in Libya or South Sudan, as though genocide could be rebranded as humanitarian outsourcing.

And the world? Still dithering over whether to call this behaviour “problematic.” As if sanctions and isolation are reserved only for the unlucky states without lobbyists in Washington or friends in European parliaments.

Israel is begging to be treated as a pariah, but we keep dressing it up as a partner.

The most awkward truth of all: Jews in the diaspora now face a choice. Condemn this grotesque betrayal of Jewish history, or keep defending the indefensible until Israel itself becomes the nightmare prophecy it was meant to escape.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and mentor and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack.

Three media commentators addressed the 98th week of New Zealand solidarity rallies for Palestine in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland today, criticising the quality of news reporting about the world’s biggest genocide crisis this century.

Speakers at other locations around the country also condemned what they said was biased media coverage.

The critics said they were affirming their humanity in solidarity with the people of Palestine as the United Nations this week officially declared a man-made famine in Gaza because of Israel’s weaponisation of starvation against the besieged enclave with 2 million population.

• READ MORE: Facing up to genocide — a New Zealand journalist bears witness with Gaza and West Bank
• NZ joins calls for urgent, independent foreign media access to Gaza
• Gaza’s ‘nutrition clinics packed amid worsening hunger crisis’
• Other killing of Gaza journalists reports

More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 22 months of conflict – mostly women and children.

One of the major criticisms at the Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA) organised rally was that the New Zealand media has consistently framed the series of massacres as a “war” between Israel and Hamas instead of a military land grab based on ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The first speaker, Mick Hall, a former news agency journalist who is currently an independent political columnist, said the way news media had covered these crimes had “undoubtedly affected public opinion”.

“As Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza devolved into a full-blown genocide, our media continued to frame Israel’s attack on Gaza as a war against Hamas, while they uncritically recorded Western leaders’ claims that Israel was exercising a ‘right of self-defence’,” he said.

NZ media lacking context
New Zealand news outlets continued to “present an ahistorical account of what has transpired since October 7, shorn of context, ignoring Israel’s history of occupation, of colonial violence against the Palestinian people”.

“An implicit understanding that violence and ethnic cleansing forms part of the organisational DNA of Zionism should have shaped how news stories were framed and presented over the past 22 months.

“Instead, newsroom leaders took their lead from our politicians, from the foreign policy positions from those in Washington and other aligned centres of power.”

Hall said newsrooms had not taken a “neutral position” — “nor are they attempting to keep us informed in any meaningful sense”.

“They failed to robustly document the type of evidence of genocide now before the International Court of Justice.

“By wilfully declining to adjudicate between contested claims of Israel and its victims, they failed to meet the informational needs of democratic citizenship in a most profound way.

“They lowered the standard of news, instead of upholding it, as they so sanctimoniously tell us.”

Evans slams media ‘apologists’
Award-winning New Zealand cartoonist Malcolm Evans congratulated the crowd of about 300 protesters for “being on the right side of history”.

“As we remember more than 240 journalists, camera and media people, murdered, assassinated, by Zionist Israel — who they were and the principles they stood for we should not forget our own media,” he said.

“The media which, contrary to the principles they claim to stand for, tried to tell us Zionist Israeli genocide was justified.”

“Whatever your understanding of the conflict in Palestine, which has brought you here today and for these past many months, it won’t have come first from the mainstream media.

“It wasn’t our reporters living in a tent in Gaza whose lives, hopes and dreams were blasted into oblivion because they exposed Zionist Israel’s evil intent.

“The reporters whose witness to Zionist Israel’s war crimes sparked your outrage were not from the ranks of Western media apologists.”

Describing the mainstream media as “pimps for propaganda”, Evans said that in any “decent world” he would not be standing there — instead the New Zealand journalists organisation would be, “expressing solidarity with their murdered Middle Eastern colleagues”.

Palestinian journalists owed debt
David Robie, author and editor of Asia Pacific Report, said the world owed a huge debt to the Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

“Although global media freedom groups have conflicting death toll numbers, it is generally accepted that more than 270 journalists and media workers have been killed — many of them deliberately targeted by the IDF [Israeli Defence Force], even killing their families as well.”

Dr Robie stressed that the Palestinian journalist death toll had eclipsed that of the combined media deaths of the American Civil War, First and Second World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam War, Cambodian War, Yugoslavia Wars, Afghan War, and the ongoing Ukraine War.

“The Palestinian death toll of journalists is greater than the combined death toll of all these other wars,” he said. “This is shocking and shameful.”

He pointed out that when Palestinian reporter Anas al-Sharif was assassinated on August 10, his entire television crew was also wiped out ahead of the Israeli invasion of Gaza City — “eliminating the witnesses, that’s what Israel does”.

Six journalists died that day in an air strike, four of them from Al Jazeera, which is banned in Israel.

Dr Robie also referred to “disturbing reports” about the existence of an IDF military unit — the so-called “legitimisation cell” — tasked with smearing and targeting journalists in Gaza with fake information.

He condemned the New Zealand media for republishing some of these “counter-narratives” without question.

“This is shameful because news editors know that they are dealing with an Israeli government with a history of lying and disinformation; a government that is on trial with the International Court of Justice for ‘plausible genocide’; and a prime minister wanted on an International Criminal Court arrest warrant to answer charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he said.

“Why would you treat this government as a credible source without scrutiny?”

Mock media cemetery
The protest included a mock pavement cemetery with about 20 “bodies” of murdered journalists and blue “press” protective vests, and placards declaring “Killing journalists is killing the truth”, “Genocide: Zionism’s final solution” and “Zionism shames Jewish tradition”.

The demonstrators marched around Te Komititanga Square, pausing at strategic moments as Palestinians read out the names of the hundreds of killed Gazan journalists to pay tribute to their courage and sacrifice.

Last year, the Gazan journalists were collectively awarded the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for their “courage and commitment to freedom of expression”.

In Ōtautahi Christchurch today, one of the speakers at the Palestine solidarity rally there was author and journalist Saige England, who called on journalists to “speak the truth on Gaza”.

“The truth of a genocide carried out by bombs and snipers, and now there is another weapon — slow starvation, mutilation by hunger,” she said.

“The truth is a statement by Israel that journalists are ‘the enemy’. Israel says journalists are the enemy, what does that tell you?

“Why? Because it has carried out invasions, apartheid and genocide for decades.”