Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared South Africa's ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, persona non grata and ordered him expelled from the United States. This immediately deprived him of diplomatic immunity and required him to leave the US in just a matter of days.
Using X as his medium to announce the defenestration of Rasool, Rubio was blunt.
South Africa's Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country.
Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS.
We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.
The inciting incident took place while participating in a foreign policy seminar at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (I swear I am not making that up) in Johannesburg. During that seminar, Rasool offered that President Trump was a White supremacist leading a White supremacist movement.
(h/t to Breitbart for the video link and transcript)
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency, at home, and — I think I’ve illustrated — abroad as well. So in terms of that, the supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white. And that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon. And so that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, et cetera et cetera. So I think I’d mention that. I think that there is also an export of the revolution. It’s no accident that Elon Musk has involved himself in UK politics, and elevated a Nigel Farage and the Reform movement, in much the same way that he was instructed that on his way to the Munich security summit, Vice President Vance addressed the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] to strengthen them in their election campaign. And that, then, begins to say, what then was the role of Afrikaners in that whole makeup. And very clearly, it’s to project white victimhood as a dog whistle that there is a global protective movement that is beginning to envelop embattled white sommunities [sic] or apparently embattles white communities. It may not be true, it may not make sense, but that is not the dog whistle that is being heard in a global, white base. So I think we need to understand all of that. Another discontinuity — it’s almost that they are pitting a supremacist insurgency against the incumbency.
The "incumbency" Rasool talks about is the existing World Economic Forum-sponsored order of untrammeled immigration and shame at being a successful society. It also comes as President Trump has offered expedited citizenship to White South African farmers who are targeted for murder and land appropriation and sanctioned South Africa for its racist behavior.
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Rasool was South Africa's ambassador to the United States from 2010 to 2015; he was reappointed only this year. His history of disparaging President Trump makes him a less-than-effective advocate for South Africa.
One Capitol Hill staffer said Rasool’s past statements “don’t bode well.” A document is being shared in Republican foreign policy circles that contain tweets — some allegedly since deleted — that were purportedly by the South African ambassador and are highly critical of the now-US president. In one of the posts, dated Mar. 6, 2017, Rasool purportedly wrote that Trump “emboldens hate disciples globally,” though no such post appears on the diplomat’s public feed.
A Republican staffer on the Hill said they were not taking meetings with Rasool after the resurfacing of the alleged past anti-Trump statements.
To make matters worse, Rasool has strong links to Hamas and other radical Islamic factions.
MEF Islamist Watch director Sam Westrop first documented Rasool’s extremism in a December 2024 article at Focus on Western Islamism detailing Rasool’s meetings with top Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials and his support for Iran’s regime and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah. The ambassador is also entrenched in American Islamist organizations, with close ties to the Virginia-based SAAR network, a collection of businesses, nonprofits, schools, and journals investigated by federal authorities for links to international terrorism.
President Joe Biden accepted Rasool’s diplomatic credentials without media fanfare in the final days of his administration. Before arriving in Washington, Rasool helped persuade the International Court of Justice that Israel seeks to “commit genocide” in Gaza.
MEF told administration officials and members of Congress of Rasool’s extremism, including his social media posts criticizing President Trump. Of Rasool’s inability to land meetings with policymakers, Semafor noted a “document”—MEF’s—that “is being shared in Republican foreign policy circles” that prompted Capitol Hill staffers to blacklist the ambassador.
“Ambassador Rasool’s extremism and close involvement with entities and regimes violently hostile to the United States afford perfectly reasonable grounds for the Trump administration to send him home,” Westrop said. “The South African ANC government knew this, and would have been wise to have preempted such a move by replacing Rasool themselves.”
The relationship between the US and South Africa was never particularly close and is very strained now in light of its internal policy of slow-rolling genocide directed at White farmers and its effectively allying itself with Russia and China via the "BRICS" alliance. This isn't a great play as the largest customer for South African manufactured goods is the United States.
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