‘No Regrets’ – SA Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool Defiant after Expulsion from US

March 24, 2025 News
US President Donald Trump and South Africa’s ambassador Ebrahim Rasool. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

By Nurah Tape – The Palestine Chronicle  

Rasool, who served as US ambassador previously, from 2010 to 2015, said it was clear that “we must rebuild and we must reset the relationship” with the US.

South Africa’s ambassador who was declared persona non grata and expelled from the US by the Trump administration, received a hero’s welcome from hundreds of supporters upon his return home.

“It was not our choice to come home but we come home with no regrets,” Ebrahim Rasool told the crowd at the Cape Town International Airport on Sunday.

“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,” Rasool said in his first public statement since he was sanctioned by the US administration over a week ago.

‘Race-Baiting Politician’ – Rubio

US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared in a post on X that “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 statement added.

Rubio’s post was linked to a report by the American far-right Breitbart news site on a webinar by the Johannesburg-based Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) in which Rasool participated.

The report claimed that Rasool told participants in the foreign policy seminar that US President Donald Trump was “leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world.”

Rasool highlighted, among other issues, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement saying it was ”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,” he added, while also raising the issue of “white victimhood” following the claims by Afrikaner South Africans of a “white genocide” taking place in the country.

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order last month to cut all funding to South Africa in protest at a land expropriation law claiming it discriminates against the “ethnic minority” Afrikaners.

In addition, Trump claimed, “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”

ICJ Case

Addressing the crowd on Sunday, Rasool stated “I want to say that we would have liked to come back with a welcome like this, if we could report to you that we had turned away the lies of a white genocide in South Africa, but we did not succeed in America with that.”

He continued: “We would have preferred to come here to say that we have won for you AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act), but we could not win it by withdrawing our case from the International Court of Justice against Israel. Because as we stand here, the bombing has continued and the shooting has continued, and if South Africa was not in the ICJ, Israel would not be exposed and the Palestinians would have no hope.”

The ambassador also said he would have preferred “to come here and say that we have won for you trade deals and that we have been able to secure for us trade deals, but we could not do so by allowing the US to choose who must be our friends and who must be our enemies.”

‘Reset’ the US Relationship

Rasool, who served as US ambassador previously, from 2010 to 2015, said it  was clear that “we must rebuild and we must reset the relationship” with the US, pointing out that “our relationship with America over 50 years has not always been with the White House.”

He pointed out that during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa when the White House and US Congress “declared us as terrorists, it was the dock workers in San Francisco that refused to touch South African goods. When Congress did not want to have sanctions, it was the American people who did not eat our fruit and did not touch our goods.”

Rasool also noted that “we cannot have a simplistic idea that while we say there must be an ambassador, that you must put a white ambassador for a white president in the United States.”

Diplomacy and Ubuntu

On the question of diplomacy, he said “We tried the conventional diplomacy and tried to avoid discussions about the genocide” but it was clear that the diplomacy of ubuntu (togetherness or humanity) was required.

“The diplomacy of Ubuntu is not the art of lying for your country. It is the art of speaking the truth but gently. The diplomacy of Ubuntu is not flattering your host. And the diplomacy of Ubuntu is not denying what is wrong. The diplomacy of Ubuntu is intellectual engagement and it is persuasion of your host about a better way,” he stated.

Rasool stressed that South Africa “has the ability again to become a moral superpower … to stand up against populism.”

Referencing the massacre of March 21, 1960, when dozens of protesters were shot and killed in Sharpeville by the apartheid police force for demonstrating against the government’s pass laws, he said South Africa stands for justice and truth.

“And so we are not here to call on you to throw away our interests with the United States because our workers depend on AGOA…. but we will do so with full dignity … and pride in what our people have died for from one massacre to another in this country,” Rasool said.

‘We Cannot Sacrifice the Palestinians’

He emphasized that “We cannot sacrifice that, we cannot sacrifice the Palestinians, we will not give up on BRICS, we will not give up on our relationship with China. 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.”

A stalwart of the anti-apartheid movement, Rasool said in a written statement issued on the day of his return, that he and his wife, Rosieda, arrived back after having been “honoured by our country to represent its values that are unflinching in its stand for truth, justice, and the equality of all people.”

He said that after months of “relentless attacks” that South Africa had to endure, “it is good to feel the dignity of being African.”

‘Called a Terrorist’

“After weeks of sustained assaults on my character and reputation – being called a terrorist, jihadist, islamist, anti-Semite – it is good to be here at home where we value ubuntu, where we see the human in each other,” the diplomat stated.

On the webinar in question, he said “there could be no better opportunity than the platform presented by an eminent thinktank like MISTFA, with an audience of academics, intellectuals, and the intelligentsia.”

“This was indeed an intellectual platform to test a thesis – and to prepare the ground for a deal with the USA. In doing so, we analysed intellectually a political phenonomen, not a personality or a nation.”

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Nurah Tape is a South Africa-based journalist. She is an editor with The Palestine Chronicle.

Related Articles

1 Comment

  1. Clearly he was a convenient scapegoat, because Dondolf Twitler wants to punish South Africa, for bringing charges against ” Israel ” , at the ICJ. He is a scumbag through and through. I didn’t vote for him. I want him and his entire administration voted out of office. Rasool is a thorn in his side because he stands with Palestine, China, and BRICS, and the ZioNazis paid Twitler to Make ” Israel ” Great Again…
    Iuck Fsrael.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*