SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
alternative for germany
Rubio Slammed for Expelling South African Ambassador Over Trump Criticism
"It underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
Mar 15, 2025
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has faced a flood of condemnation since announcing on social media Friday 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 President Donald Trump," the secretary claimed. "We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA."
In the post on X—the social media site owned by Elon Musk, Trump's South Africa-born billionaire adviser—Rubio linked to an article by the right-wing news site Breitbart about Rasool saying during a Friday webinar that the U.S. president is leading global a white supremacist movement.
As examples of Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement exporting its "supremacist assault," Rasool pointed to Musk elevating Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform U.K. party, and Vice President JD Vance meeting with the leader of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party.
Responding to Rubio on X, North Carolina State University assistant teaching professor Nathan Lean said: "Ebrahim Rasool is a man of genuine decency, moral courage, and is a friend. This makes me absolutely embarrassed to be an American. And it underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly responded: "Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool is a principled leader who fought alongside Nelson Mandela against apartheid and has dedicated his career to democracy, interfaith cooperation, and justice. Baseless attacks like this only serve to divide. We stand by him and his lifelong commitment to building a more just and inclusive world."
Laila Al-Arian, executive producer of Al Jazeera's "Fault Lines," declared that "this administration is virulently and unabashedly Islamophobic, not even trying to hide how unhinged they are as they go after people for speech."
Rasool previously served as ambassador during the Obama administration and returned to the role shortly before Trump began his second term. Earlier this week, Semafor reported on his difficulties dealing with the current administration:
He has failed to secure routine meetings with State Department officials and key Republican figures since Trump took office in January, Washington and South African government insiders told Semafor, drawing frustration in Pretoria.
Rasool is likely to have been frozen out for his prior vocal criticism of Israel, a South African diplomat, based in Washington, told Semafor. "A man named Ebrahim, who is Muslim, with a history of pro-Palestine politics, is not likely to do well in that job right now," said one of them. While South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023, accusing it of genocide in Gaza, Rasool is nevertheless widely considered to be among the government's most ardent pro-Palestine voices.
South African political analyst Sandile Swana told Al Jazeera on Friday that the "core of the dispute" with the diplomatic was the genocide case against U.S.-armed Israel. In the fight against apartheid, the U.S. "supported the apartheid regime," said Swana. "Rasool continues to point out the behaviour of the United States, even now is to support apartheid and genocide."
Other critics also pointed to the ongoing court battle over Israel's utter destruction of Gaza and mass slaughter of Palestinians.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad told Rubio: "Your declaration of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool as persona non grata is a racist, Islamophobic, transparent act of retaliation for South Africa's opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza."
Imraan Siddiqi, a former congressional candidate in Washington who now leads the state's branch of CAIR, said that "he stood up firmly against apartheid, so it's no coincidence you're punishing him in favor of an openly apartheid state."
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's office said in a statement Saturday that "the presidency has noted the regrettable expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the United States of America, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool.
"The presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter," the office added. "South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America."
The diplomat's expulsion follows Trump signing an executive order last month that frames South Africa's land law as "blatant discrimination" against the country's white minority. Writing about the order for Foreign Policy in Focus, Zeb Larson and William Minter noted that "his actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa."
##
Keep ReadingShow Less
International Push for Consumer Boycott of US Grows
"A lot of people feel betrayed by our closest ally," said one marketer in Canada, where President Donald Trump has imposed 25% tariffs.
Mar 12, 2025
With declining consumer interest in Tesla vehicles sending CEO and Trump administration ally Elon Musk into an apparent panic over the electric automaker's plummeting stock—spurring an impromptu car show on the White House lawn Tuesday with President Donald Trump scolding Americans for not buying Musk's products—recent reports from across Europe and Canada suggest the two right-wing leaders are pushing global consumers to reject not just Tesla, but a wide array of American goods.
As The Guardianreported Wednesday, numbers released this week by Statistics Canada showed waning enthusiasm for Canadians to visit their southern neighbor, with 23% fewer Canadians taking road trips into the U.S.—the most popular mode of cross-border travel—this year so far compared to February 2024.
With Trump initiating a trade war with Canada—falsely claiming the country is a major source of fentanyl flowing into the U.S.—by imposing 25% tariffs on all Canadian imports and threatening to take over the country as the "cherished Fifty First State," consumers have been downloading apps like "Maple Scan" and "Is This Canadian?" to avoid purchasing U.S.-made products.
"A lot of people feel betrayed by our closest ally," Emma Cochran, an Ottawa-based marketer, toldNBC News on Wednesday.
Cochrane partnered with a colleague to make hats and shirts emblazoned with the phrase, "Canada is not for sale," one of which was worn by Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week.
"This felt like a way that we could participate and just kind of say, 'We're going to stand up for Canada,'" she told NBC.
Canadian officials announced retaliatory tariffs on $21 billion in goods on Wednesday after Trump raised global steel and aluminum tariffs to 25%—backing off of an earlier threat of a 50% levy.
As some Canadian provinces began pulling U.S. liquor brands from government-run stores and replacing bottles with "Buy Canadian Instead" signs, the CEO of the Kentucky-based Brown-Forman, which makes Jack Daniel's, called the boycott "frustrating."
"That's worse than a tariff because it's literally taking your sales away," Whiting said on an earnings call last week.
Nick Talley, a physician-scientist in New South Wales, Australia, said Trump "presumably... thought everyone would just bow down" after he imposed tariffs and raised prices for consumers around the world.
Danish grocery company Salling Group has also taken action to oppose Trump's threat to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Danish kingdom.
The company is still carrying U.S.-made products but is marking European-made goods with a black star to identify them for shoppers.
A Verian/SVT survey in Sweden on Tuesday found that "the U.S.'s actions in world politics... have led many Swedes to hesitate in the face of American products."
Twenty-nine percent of Swedish residents said they had refrained from buying U.S. goods in the last month amid Trump's trade war, his temporary suspension of aid to Ukraine after publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House earlier this month, and Musk's meddling in European politics by expressing support for British right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson and German political party Alternative for Germany, which has embraced Nazi slogans and came in second in last month's elections.
Norwegian fuel company Haltbakk urged "all Norwegians and Europeans" to join in boycotting the U.S. after the confrontation between Trump and Zelenskyy, which the firm called "the biggest shit show ever presented 'live on TV' by the current American president and his vice president."
The company has provided fuel to U.S. ships in Norwegian ports but said it would no longer do so as the international community expressed shock over Trump's treatment of Zelenskyy and Ukrainian victims of Russia's invasion.
Meanwhile, European consumers have continued to make their views on Musk—a "special government employee" of Trump's who has spearheaded the slashing of federal jobs and spending and threatened to cut $700 billion from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—by refusing to buy Tesla cars.
February sales were down 76% in Germany, 53% in Portugal, 55% in Italy, and 48% in Norway and Denmark—contributing the company's plummeting share price and loss of $800 billion in market cap.
Trump offered to buy a Tesla before staging a showing of five of the cars at the White House Tuesday, claiming American consumers are "illegally" boycotting the company, but as Channel 4 in the U.K. reported, "the company will have to find a lot more buyers to make up for a sharp decline in sales across Europe" as both boycotts and protests at Tesla dealerships spread.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Jewish Americans Say GOP's Phony Charges of Antisemitism Only Empower Trump's Authoritarianism
"Distorting the meaning of antisemitism and making Jews the face of a campaign to crush free speech is deeply dangerous to Jewish Americans and all of us who work for collective liberation."
Mar 05, 2025
A video shown at the beginning of a hearing on antisemitism held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday set the tone for the Republican Party's approach to the issue, with the GOP-led panel featuring images of student protesters against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza—but none of Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, publicly displaying a Nazi salute at an inauguration event in January.
Beth Miller, political director for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, said she was "shocked" by the omission, but argued that "the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are operating under the guise of fighting antisemitism, while actually working to attack the Palestinian rights movement, universities, and civil liberties."
The hearing, said Miller, is consistent with the threat Trump issued Tuesday to student organizers who take part in protests like those that spread across the U.S. last year in support of Palestinian rights, when he said he would "jail and deport" students and pull federal funding from schools that allow what he called "illegal protests."
"The GOP does not care about Jewish safety," said Miller. "This is political theater."
One witness called by the committee Democrats was Kevin Rachlin, Washington director of the Nexus Project, which promotes government action against antisemitism. Rachlin testified that while seeing Musk display a Nazi salute at an event for the president was "beyond terrifying for American Jews," what was "most troubling" about Musk's actions was the "lack of condemnation" from Trump's own party.
Leading antisemitism expert: Seeing the Nazi salute on the most prestigious platform in the country is beyond terrifying for American Jews.
What's most troubling? Lacking condemnation when "public figures like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk advance antisemitic conspiracy theories.” pic.twitter.com/dY5BjeBXk3
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (🦋 now on bsky) (@JudiciaryDems) March 5, 2025
Republicans called three people to testify: Adela Cojab, a legal fellow at the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; and Asra Nomani, editor of the Pearl Project. All three witnesses suggested students who oppose Israel's violent policies in Palestine, not the far right, are the propelling force behind antisemitism in the U.S.—despite the fact that many Jewish students organized, participated in, and supported the campus protests that spread nationwide last year and reported that pro-Israel counter-protesters were largely responsible for making demonstrations unsafe.
Nomani warned that antisemitism "has become an industry," but the advocacy group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action suggested her words carried little credibility considering she was "talking about student protesters... not Trump, Musk, and their enablers in Congress who are actively wielding the machinery of antisemitism and making Jews in America less safe."
Cojab called for the official adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which uses examples of antisemitism including "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, i.e. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor," and "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis"—suggesting that statements by Israeli officials calling for the "cleansing" of Gaza and Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza should never be referred to as genocidal actions.
Miller noted that the IHRA's definition is "opposed by Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli groups, as well as civil liberties organizations like the ACLU," and urged viewers to tell their senators to oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify the IHRA's definition.
Barry Trachtenberg, presidential chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University and a member of JVP's academic advisory council, warned that "distorting the meaning of antisemitism and making Jews the face of a campaign to crush free speech is deeply dangerous to Jewish Americans and all of us who work for collective liberation."
JVP Action warned that although the hearing "will do nothing to promote Jewish safety, it will expand authoritarian policies to dismantle civil liberties, and enable the MAGA Right to score cheap political points."
Bend the Arc credited Ranking Member Sen. Dick Durbin for pointing to Musk's amplifying of the far-right, Nazi-aligned Alternative for Germany political party ahead of February's elections, the promotion of the antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory by Trump and others on the far right, and the president's dismantling of the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights as evidence that "Trump administration actions do NOT make Jews safer."
Meirav Solomon, a Jewish student at Tufts University and co-vice president of J Street U's New England branch, testified that "Congress and the Trump administration are abandoning the most effective tool the government has to fight antisemitism in all of its forms."
"The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) handles cases of discrimination and harassment against Jewish students, providing a crucial avenue for Jews and other minorities to advocate for our rights," said Solomon. "This administration has suspended thousands of OCR investigations and no longer allows students or their families to file complaints, and now the office's future is uncertain."
Jewish college student and advocate against antisemitism: The actions of the Trump Administration are divisive, and they erode the rights and freedoms that've allowed American Jews to flourish.
Our future depends on your commitment to protect pluralism and democracy. pic.twitter.com/SwSJ10tMic
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (🦋 now on bsky) (@JudiciaryDems) March 5, 2025
Solomon called on lawmakers on the committee to "be honest about the most urgent threat to the Jewish community. It is not student protesters but the bloody legacy of Pittsburgh and Poway, Charlottesville and the Capitol riot."
Ahead of the hearing, Bryn Mawr College student Ellie Baron told JVP Action that organizers must "continue working to dismantle real antisemitism while also defending our friends and community members who are falsely accused of antisemitism. The only way forward is through forging greater solidarity with all people who are targeted by fascism and supremacist ideologies, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular