CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The Trump administration’s decision to expel the South African ambassador is its latest move against a country it has singled out for sanctions and accused of being anti-white and anti-American.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool was “no longer welcome in our great country” and said he was “a race-baiting politician” who hates America and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Rubio’s post didn’t explain what was behind the decision but linked to a story by the conservative Breitbart news site. The story reported on a talk Rasool gave Friday on a webinar where he said the Make America Great Again movement could be seen as being a response to “a supremacist instinct.”
Trump had already issued an executive order last month cutting all funding to South Africa over some of its domestic and foreign policies. The order criticized the Black-led South African government on multiple fronts, saying it is pursuing anti-white policies at home and supporting “bad actors” in the world like the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran.
White farmers in South Africa
A white minority group in South Africa has been a central focus for Trump.
Trump falsely accused the South African government of a rights violation against white Afrikaner farmers by seizing their land through a new expropriation law. No land has been seized and the South African government has pushed back, saying U.S. criticism is driven by misinformation.
The Trump administration’s references to the Afrikaner people — who are descendants of Dutch and other European settlers — have also elevated previous claims made by Trump’s South African-born advisor Elon Musk and some conservative U.S. commentators that the South African government is allowing attacks on white farmers in what amounts to a genocide.
That has been disputed by experts in South Africa, who say there is no evidence of whites being targeted, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country that suffers from a very high crime rate.
The issue of land in South Africa is highly emotive given that more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule, whites still own most of the good commercial farming land despite making up just 7% of the population. The South African government says the expropriation law aims to address those historic inequalities but is not “a confiscation tool” and will target unused land.
Trump has offered Afrikaner farmers refugee status in the U.S. and a fast track to citizenship, but groups representing them say they want to stay in South Africa.
Israel-Hamas connections
Trump’s sanctioning of South Africa also cited the country’s case at the United Nations’ top court accusing U.S. ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
During arguments in that ongoing and highly controversial case, Israel accused South Africa of acting as a proxy for Hamas. Trump has repeated that, questioning South Africa’s motives and accusing it of an anti-American foreign policy that supports Hamas, Iran, China and Russia.
South Africa’s post-apartheid government has long been a supporter of the Palestinian cause, going back to the time of Nelson Mandela, its first Black president. It compares the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to the experiences of Black South Africans who were confined to certain areas during apartheid.
Rasool, the South African ambassador, comes from a Muslim community in South Africa that has been a center of support for Palestinians. The Breitbart writer whose story was cited by Rubio — senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak — was also born in South Africa and is Jewish. His story cast Rasool as a Hamas supporter.
Pollak has other connections to the U.S.-South Africa situation after recently meeting with a lobby group representing Afrikaners. South African media have reported that Pollak is a contender to be Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
“DEI and climate change”
The U.S. criticism of South Africa has extended to its presidency this year of the Group of 20, a bloc of major economies that aims to bring the developed and developing world together. Rubio skipped a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in South Africa last month and said he would boycott the G20 summit in South Africa in November.
He said he had a problem with South Africa’s theme for its G20 presidency, which is “solidarity, equality and sustainability.” Rubio, in a post on X, dismissed that as “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and climate change” and said he would not waste taxpayer money on it.
Tensions during the Biden administration
The South African government has expressed surprise at Trump’s sanctions and says it wants to fix its relationship with the U.S. “South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship,” said a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday in response to Rasool’s expulsion.
But U.S.-South Africa ties were strained even before Trump. The Biden administration accused South Africa of supporting Russia in the war in Ukraine while claiming a neutral stance. Like with the Palestinians, South Africa has historic ties to Russia, which supported the fight against apartheid.
While Ramaphosa has repeatedly said he wants to engage in talks with the Trump administration, his African National Congress party has at times been defiant. The ANC recently invited the Iranian ambassador to its headquarters in Johannesburg and said it wouldn’t hide its friends.
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