Ireland Bars American Pastor Accused of Hate Speech
The government of Ireland has barred an Arizona-based Baptist pastor accused of anti-Semitic and homophobic hate speech from entering the country, invoking for the first time a 1999 immigration act that allows such exclusion orders on grounds of national security or public policy....
Pastor Anderson’s Faithful Word Baptist Church has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and by the Anti-Defamation League. He first gained prominence outside his ministry, which is in a Tempe, Ariz., strip mall, when he announced in 2009 that he hated President Barack Obama and prayed for his death. He has called for the United States government to exterminate all gay people and welcomed the murder of 49 people in the mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016.
“The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world, because, you know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles,” Pastor Anderson said in a video he posted online. “That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of just disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar, O.K.?”
A Holocaust denier, he has claimed that the Jewish Messiah is the Antichrist, that the Talmud is blasphemous and that Jews believe that it is not a sin to cheat gentiles. His church, which he founded in 2005, rejects abortion and all forms of birth control.
Pastor Anderson announced on Twitter in March that he was planning to preach in Dublin on May 26 but gave no further details....
Pastor Anderson was banned from the United Kingdom in 2016 and has also been denied entry to or deported from Botswana, Canada, Jamaica, Malawi and South Africa....
Pastor Anderson had also announced events in Amsterdam and Stockholm for later this month, but on May 1 the Dutch government arranged to have him barred from entering the Schengen free travel area, which includes 26 European countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands....