The South African ambassador who was expelled from the United States and declared persona non grata by the Trump administration was welcomed home at an airport 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,” Rasool told the supporters as he addressed them with a megaphone. “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.” “It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets.” 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.” Rasool said on his return home it was important for South Africa to fix its relationship with the U.S. after President Donald Trump punished the country and accused it of taking an anti-American stance even before the decision to expel him. The U.S. president issued an executive order last month 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,” 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 ex-ambassador’s first public comments since the Trump administration declared him persona non grata over a week ago, removed his diplomatic immunities and privileges, and gave him until this Friday to leave the U.S. It is highly unusual for the U.S. to expel a foreign ambassador. Rasool stands by the comments cited by Rubio Rasool was declared persona non grata by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a post on X on March 14. Rubio said Rasool was a “race-baiting politician” who hates the U.S. and Trump. Although Rubio didn’t directly cite a reason, his post linked to a story by the conservative Breitbart news site that reported on a talk Rasool gave on a webinar organized by a South African think tank. In his talk, Rasool spoke in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration and mentioned the possibility of a U.S. 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 U.S.A., 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 U.S.A. in which the voting electorate in the U.S.A. is projected to become 48% white,” Rasool said in the talk. On Sunday, he said he stood by those comments, and characterized them as merely alerting intellectuals and political leaders in South Africa that the U.S. and its politics had changed. “It is not the U.S. of Obama, it is not the U.S. of Clinton, it is a different U.S. and therefore our language must change,” Rasool said. “I would […]