US secretary of state accuses Ebrahim Rasool of being a \u2018race-baiting politician who hates America\u2019 and Donald Trump
\n Washington
\nThe United States is in effect expelling South Africa\u2019s ambassador to Washington, with secretary of state Marco Rubio accusing the envoy of hating the country and President Donald Trump.
\n\u201cSouth Africa\u2019s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,\u201d Rubio posted on X on Friday.
\nRubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being \u201ca race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS\u201d, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. \u201cWe have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.\u201d
\nNeither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African thinktank\u2019s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.
\nRasool pointed to Elon Musk\u2019s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a \u201cdog whistle\u201d in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an \u201cembattled white community\u201d.
\nRasool is a former anti-apartheid campaigner who served time in prison for his activism and went on to become a politician in the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, the country\u2019s first post-apartheid president.
\nThe expulsion of an ambassador is a very rare move by the US, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.
\nIn response, South Africa\u2019s presidency said in an online post that it had noted the \u201cregrettable expulsion of South Africa\u2019s ambassador\u201d and urged everyone to maintain the \u201cestablished diplomatic decorum\u201d on the matter.
\nIt is the latest development in rising tensions between Washington and Pretoria. In February, Trump froze US aid to South Africa, citing a law in the country that he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers.
\nLast week, Trump further fuelled tensions, saying South Africa\u2019s farmers were welcome to settle in the US after repeating his accusations that the government was \u201cconfiscating\u201d land from white people.
\nTrump posted on his Truth Social platform that \u201cany farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship\u201d.
\nOne of Trump\u2019s closest allies is South African-born billionaire Musk, who has accused South African president Cyril Ramaphosa\u2019s government of having \u201copenly racist ownership laws\u201d.
\nSouth Africa was ruled by white Afrikaner leaders during apartheid, which violently repressed the country\u2019s black majority, including forcing them to live in segregated townships and rural \u201chomelands\u201d. Afrikaners are descended mainly from the Dutch, who began colonising South Africa in 1652, as well as French Huguenot refugees sponsored by the Dutch.
\nMore than three decades after white minority rule ended, South Africa remains hugely unequal, with land and wealth still largely concentrated among white people, who make up 7% of the population, about half native Afrikaans speakers, while black people are 81%.
\nHowever, some white South Africans claim they are discriminated against, often citing the country\u2019s affirmative action laws.
\nDuring a G20 event in South Africa last month, Ramaphosa said he had a \u201cwonderful\u201d call with Trump soon after the US leader took office in January. But relations later \u201cseemed to go a little bit off the rails\u201d, he said.
\nIn Friday\u2019s webinar, Rasool \u2013 speaking by videoconference \u2013 talked in academic language of the Trump administration\u2019s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration.
\n\u201cThe 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,\u201d the South African ambassador said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US secretary of state accuses Ebrahim Rasool of being a \u2018race-baiting politician who hates America\u2019 and Donald Trump Washington The United States is in effect expelling South Africa\u2019s ambassador to Washington, with secretary of state Marco Rubio accusing the envoy of hating the country and President Donald Trump. \u201cSouth Africa\u2019s ambassador to the United States […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-467261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n