Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the expulsion of South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool. Rubio cited some of Rasool’s comments made during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), a South African think tank. Rasool accused the Trump administration of launching a “supremacist assault on incumbency” and called the president’s victory a response “to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA.”

The ambassador also opined on “the role of Afrikaners in that whole makeup,” claiming that Trump projects “white victimhood as a dog whistle that there is a global protective movement that is beginning to envelop embattled white communities or apparently embattled white communities.” Predictably, legacy outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post concurred with Rasool in their coverage of the incident.

Rasool seems oblivious to the very nature of his job. South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is supposed to represent his country’s interests by developing cordial relations with the United States. One doubts, however, whether he can perform this function when he deems the United States to be illegitimate. Instead of following long-established diplomatic norms, Rasool inserted himself into U.S. domestic politics by attacking President Trump and, by extension, the millions of Americans who voted for him.

Like many in South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), Rasool’s career was built on race-baiting identity politics, corruption, and a deep-seated animus towards the West. Prior to being appointed ambassador to the U.S. by former President Jacob Zuma, a post he first held from 2010 to 2015, Rasool served as premier of the Western Cape province. His tenure in that post was marred by the infamous “brown envelope” affair, in which he allegedly paid journalists to write stories favorable to him while smearing his rivals. Although investigations against Rasool later stalled, at least one journalist publicly confessed that he “served as an embedded spin doctor to former premier Ebrahim Rasool while working as a political reporter,” according to the Cape Argus newspaper—the same newspaper for which the journalist worked. The ANC leadership eventually recalled Rasool from his position in 2008.

In a 2009 meeting with then U.S. ambassador Donald Gips, Rasool attributed his downfall to ANC leaders growing tired of the Western Cape’s non-black population receiving racial preferences despite being a numerical majority. This supposedly led to ANC leaders becoming suspicious of Muslims like him, and the “lack of a black middle class resulted in perceived inequalities as white and coloured businesses outpaced their black-owned competitors for government contracts.”

There are two ways to interpret Rasool’s statements. Either he, a Muslim of mixed European, Indian, and Javanese descent who served a majority non-black constituency, was a victim of genuine racism, which was plausible in a black-dominated spoils system like that of the ANC, or he was sacked due to his corruption charges and was trying to distract from this fact by manufacturing racism. No matter which scenario is true, both speak volumes about the obsession with race in South African politics.

Rasool was perhaps best known for his anti-Israel stance. He spoke fondly of Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a radical Islamist cleric known for supporting suicide bombings by Palestinian militants. “[Al-Qaradawi] lived up to the Quranic dictum: imbued with knowledge, standing on justice!” he wrote in a post on X. In 2019, Rasool appeared at a fundraising dinner featuring senior Hamas official Basem Naim. He urged attendees to equip “brothers and sisters for a war that is surely coming.” Mere days before the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Rasool boasted about scarfs signed and gifted to him by former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. His ties to extremists were such that all non-ANC parties in South Africa’s post-2024 governing coalition opposed his re-appointment. Ultimately, the ANC prevailed, and Rasool presented his credentials to outgoing President Joe Biden on Jan. 13, 2025.

That the ANC would pick Ebrahim Rasool, of all people, to lead its diplomatic mission to Washington—knowing that a Republican administration will soon be in power—is a testament to its inflated sense of self-importance. Presiding over a stagnant economy, crumbling infrastructure, soaring crime rates, and a slew of violent attacks on whites and other minorities, the ANC government still sees itself fit to lecture the U.S. on governance and civil rights.

Ambassador Rasool himself said as much in a November 2024 interview. “I think that South Africa, having inherited the mantle of what I call a moral superpower in the sense that we fought a heroic anti-Apartheid struggle,” he said. “All of that speaks to a remarkable morality within South Africa even in our mistakes and our missteps.”

Presumably, it is this “remarkable morality” that drove South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to say in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 protests at the Capitol that “we are on the ready to provide [Americans] with our own experience and how we were able to navigate a very difficult situation that confronted us at the dawn of our democracy.

It is this “remarkable morality” that brought about South Africa’s infamous Expropriation Act of 2024, which allows for the seizure without compensation of the private property of white Afrikaners. And it is this “remarkable morality” that has long cowed public opinion in America and the broader Western world, suppressing an honest assessment of what is quickly becoming a failed state. After all, only a “racist” would dare call a failed state what it is, or worse, notice the uncanny parallels between its parasitic rulers and leftist elites in the West. That Rasool was named a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Georgetown University’s prestigious Walsh School of Foreign Service shows where the sympathies of the learned class lie.

To Rasool, Ramaphosa, and their useful idiots, the Rainbow Nation exists to condemn America and remind her of her flaws. Diplomacy to them amounts to little more than lectures on progressive dogma. The South African ambassador’s expulsion shows that America will not allow herself to be schooled by third-world fanatics.