The South African ambassador who was expelled from the US and declared persona non grata by the administration of US President Donald Trump was welcomed home at an airport on Sunday by hundreds of supporters who sang songs praising him.
Crowds at Cape Town International Airport surrounded Ebrahim Rasool and his wife, Rosieda, as they emerged in the arrivals terminal in their hometown, and they needed a police escort to help them navigate their way through the building.
“A declaration of persona non grata is meant to humiliate you, but when you return to crowds like this, and with warmth ... like this, then I will wear my persona non grata as a badge of dignity,” Ebrahim Rasool told the supporters as he addressed them with a megaphone. “It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets.”
Photo: Reuters
Ebrahim Rasool was expelled for comments he made on a Webinar that included him saying that the Make America Great Again movement was partly a response to “a supremacist instinct.”
Ebrahim Rasool said on his return home it was important for South Africa to fix its relationship with the US after Trump punished the nation and accused it of taking an anti-US stance even before the decision to expel him.
Trump last month issued an executive order cutting all funding to South Africa, alleging its government is supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran, and pursuing anti-white policies at home.
“We don’t come here to say we are anti-American,” Ebrahim Rasool said to the crowd. “We are not here to call on you to throw away our interests with the United States.”
They were the former ambassador’s first public comments since the Trump administration declared him persona non grata more than a week ago, and removed his diplomatic immunities and privileges.
It is highly unusual for the US to expel a foreign ambassador.
Ebrahim Rasool was declared persona non grata by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a post on social media on March 14. Rubio said Rasool was a “race-baiting politician,” who hates the US and Trump.
Although Rubio did not directly cite a reason, his post linked to a story by the conservative Breitbart news site that reported on a talk Ebrahim Rasool gave on a Webinar organized by a South African think tank.
In his talk, Ebrahim Rasool spoke in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration, and mentioned the possibility of a US where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.
“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 percent white,” Ebrahim Rasool said.
Ebrahim Rasool on Sunday said that he said he stood by those comments, and characterized them as merely alerting intellectuals and political leaders in South Africa that the US and its politics had changed.
He also said that South Africa would resist pressure from the US — and anyone else — to drop its case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Trump administration has cited that case against Israel as one of the reasons it alleges South Africa is anti-US.
“As we stand here, the bombing [in Gaza] has continued and the shooting has continued, and if South Africa was not in the [International Court of Justice], Israel would not be exposed, and the Palestinians would have no hope,” Ebrahim Rasool said. “We cannot sacrifice the Palestinians ... but we will also not give up with our relationship with the United States. We must fight for it, but we must keep our dignity.”
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