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Foreign Minister Marco Rubio declared “Persona Non Grata” in the United States in South Africa’s ambassador on Friday and described him as a “racial bait politician who hates America”.
In a contribution to X Rubio wrote that Ebrahim Rasool was “no longer welcome in our big country” and was associated with a report by the conservative Breitbart News website via an online lecture that the ambassador for the foreign policy of the Trump government and its effects on South Africa.
“What Donald Trump starts is an attack on the term in office by mobilizing supremacism against the term at home. . . and abroad ”, Rasool said In the online event of the South African Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
Rasool’s displacement is the latest episode in the rapid deterioration in relationships between Washington and Pretoria since Trump took office.
South Africa brought in the trial against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the end of 2023 and accused Israel of violating international laws of genocide during their war against Hamas in Gaza, which is energetically contested by Israel.
In the past month, Trump frozen foreign support in South Africa, partly in retaliation for the ICJ case and his complaints about Pretoria’s misaligned state, which annoyed the president and his billionaire born in South Africa Elon Muschus.
In his lecture, Rasool added that Trump’s “Supemacist attack on the term” is visible “in the USA’s domestic policy, the Maga movement. . . In response not only to a supremacist instinct, but on very clear data that show great demographic changes in the United States, in which the voting rights in the United States are expected to become 48 percent, ”says a video of the event published on YouTube.
The labeling of an ambassador Non Grata is a rare and serious diplomatic step.
In the past month, Rubio then skipped a meeting of the G20 Foreign Minister in South Africa accuse Pretoria of “anti -Americanism” and “very bad things”, such as:
Rasool, an experienced diplomat that was loud in his criticism of Israel in the past, said before the start of his post in December that he would put the “megaphone” of South Africa away on Gaza when he tried to improve relationships with Washington.
