Yemini was born in Melbourne, Victoria to Zephaniah (formerly Stephen) and Hava Waks,[8] and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda East.[1] He is one of seventeen children.[1] One of his elder siblings is Manny Waks.[4]
Yemini attended Yeshivah College, and was later sent to ultra-Orthodox schools in the U.S., Israel and Brazil. He returned to Melbourne when he was 16, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. He spent the next two years in rehab, foster homes and crisis care.[1]
Yemini lives in Berwick, Victoria with his wife, a hairdresser. They met at a coffee shop in 2018.[1]
Activities
Yemini joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) when he was 19, in an effort to straighten out.[1] He served with the IDF's Golani Brigade from 2005 until 2008. Most of his active duty was spent along the border of the Gaza Strip.[9] After returning to Australia, Yemini opened his first IDF gym in Caulfield, Victoria, followed by a second in Melbourne's CBD in 2016.[10][11] In 2018, Yemeni sold the gyms.[1]
Through the party and his collaboration with Tommy Robinson and Rebel News, he has been affiliated with the counter-jihad movement.[14] In August 2022, Yemini was denied entry to New Zealand due to a 2019 criminal conviction for assaulting his ex-wife.[15] Yemini claimed the decision was due to an article in The New Zealand Herald that described him and fellow content creator Rukshan Fernando as "Australian conspiracy commentators".[16][17] Yemini was allowed entry to New Zealand in 2023.[18]
Social media bans
In April 2016, the Facebook page for Yemini's gym was banned for three days for sharing an antisemitic post with the hashtag "saynotoracism". Yemini said he had shared the post to raise awareness of the intolerance faced by the Jewish community.[9]
In August 2018, Yemini's main Facebook page was banned for hate speech violations. The decision came after Yemini posted the personal phone number of journalist Osman Faruqi, resulting in Faruqi receiving abusive messages and death threats from Yemini's followers.[19][20]
In September 2020, two of Yemini's Facebook pages were banned following inquiries by Gizmodo Australia.[20] As of February 2021, Yemini was posting anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content on Facebook.[21]
Legal issues
In 2016, one of Yemini's brothers, Manny Waks, sued him for defamation after he claimed that Waks and their father were harbouring a known paedophile in the family home.[22] Waks dropped the lawsuit after Yemini apologised a few months later.[1]
In July 2019, Yemini admitted to throwing a chopping board that hit his former wife on her forehead in 2016. He also pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to harass by sending abusive text messages to her, and one charge of breaching an intervention order relating to a video of a man. Yemini's lawyer argued he had not meant to hit her.[23][24]
In 2023, Yemini sued Facebook fact-checkerRMIT FactLab for labelling Rebel News content as "misleading". The case was dismissed as he had "failed to make any formal inquiries via appropriate channels with relevant persons".[27]
Views
Yemini has described himself as a "proud Zionist".[28] He has described himself as "proudly anti-Islam", Islam as a "barbaric ideology", and Muslim countries as "Islamic shitholes".[29] At a 2018 demonstration against the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, Yemini declared himself to be "the world's proudest Jewish Nazi".[16]
^Chobocky, Barbara (2002). "Welcome to the Waks Family". Jewish Film Institute. Archived from the original on 16 April 2021. Retrieved 30 January 2024.
^ abLevi, Joshua (6 October 2016). "Manny Waks sues brother". The Australian Jewish News. Archived from the original on 29 January 2024. Retrieved 30 January 2024.
Perry, Barbara; Mirrlees, Tanner; Scrivens, Ryan (27 February 2019). "The Dangers of Porous Borders". Journal of Hate Studies. 14 (1). Gonzaga University: 61. doi:10.33972/jhs.124. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 21 October 2020. Far-right Canadian media outlets, for instance, have bombarded its subscribers with all kinds of pro-Trump, racist and xenophobic dialogue, both before and after Trump's victory. Rebel Media, a popular far-right online media platform run by Ezra Levant, a controversial Canadian far-right political activist, writer and broadcaster, has been an outright supporter of Trump, publishing countless extreme-right leaning articles on why to support him.
