Washington DC [US], March 15 : United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday (local time) announced that the South African Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, is now considered 'Persona Non Grata' and is "no longer welcomed" in the country.
Rubio accused Rasool of being a "race-baiting politician who hates America."
"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," Rubio wrote in a post on X.
Rubio's post linked to a news article about Rasool's comments about Trump's election and presidency, as reported by CNN.
Rubio's response came after Rasool criticized US President Donald Trump, accusing him of "mobilising a supremacism."
"What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home and ... abroad as well," Rasool said.
Rasool also argued that Trump's Make America Great Again movement was a response "not simply to a supremacist instinct," but to shifts in US demographics "in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48 per cent white and that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon," CNN reported.
"So that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there's data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, etc. etc.," he said.
Rasool said, "It's no accident" that Musk has involved himself in far-right British politics and that Vice President JD Vance met with the leader of a far-right German political party before the elections there, as reported by CNN.
"That then begins to say what was the role then of Afrikaners in that whole project," he continued. "Very clearly it's to project white victimhood as a dog whistle."
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