South Africa’s Terror-Tied Ambassador Returns to Washington

South Africa has re-appointed the terror-connected Islamist diplomat Ebrahim Rasool as its ambassador to America.

Rasool, a politician for the African National Congress (ANC) party and a fellow at Georgetown University, previously served as Cape Town’s ambassador to Washington between 2010 and 2015 under the Obama administration.

In more recent years, on top of continued speaking roles at Western Islamist events, Rasool is best known for his anti-Israel activism and trumpeting of South Africa’s efforts to persuade the International Court of Justice that Israel wields an “intent to commit genocide.”

Addressing his mosque in Athlone, a suburb of Cape Town, Rasool explained: “I believe that I go [to Washington] as a representative of a moral superpower in a world that has lost its moral anchors.”

But an administration set adrift seems preferable to Rasool’s waters. The ambassador has a long history of involvement with international Islamism, including the designated terrorist organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In 2004, following Israel’s assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Rasool, then serving as finance minister in South Africa’s Western Cape, described the Hamas founder as “one of the greatest inspirations.” He prayed that Palestinians, according to writer and broadcaster Joel Pollak, will “stand up to these enemies and never succumb, that they fight and they fight under a flag of Islam.”

Allegedly, Rasool further called on his audience to “face the enemies—they are all over the world.”

At the same event, Rasool’s fellow speakers claimed that Jews had “murdered and killed most of the prophets of God,” referred to Israel as “the filthy Jewish nation” and warned: “Do not go into any agreements with Jews, they are a filthy people.”

That same decade, for Hamas dignitaries visiting South Africa, Rasool’s office served as a key stopping point. In 2007, while premier of the Western Cape region, Rasool hosted Mohammed Nazzal, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau.

In 2024, the U.S. government designated Nazzal, Rasool’s Hamas contact, as one of the “key officials who seemingly maintain legitimate, public-facing roles within the group, yet who facilitate their terrorist activities, represent their interests abroad, and coordinate the transfer of money and goods into Gaza.”

Such a friendship seems suited to Rasool, who has shown a consistent willingness to embrace terrorists and radicals for decades.

In 2015, Rasool took part in an initiative to unite Hamas and Fatah, in an effort to improve “coherence in resistance.” His involvement won him the admiration of terror leader Ismail Haniyeh, the late Hamas head, who presented him with a signed Palestinian scarf.

Following the assassination of Haniyeh in July 2024, Rasool’s mosque in Cape Town held prayers for the terror leader. The imam declared the “garden of Islam will be watered by the blood of the martyrs,” and, MEMRI notes, he prayed: “May Allah liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestine in its entirety from the filth of the Jews.”

In 2020, the Iranian regime listed Rasool as a speaker at the South African Al-Quds Day, an annual event to celebrate the designated terrorist organization Hezbollah and its “resistance” against Israel. Alongside South African and British Islamists, Rasool joined with the Iranian regime’s then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif, as well as Zahra Mostafavi, the daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as Khaled al-Ghodoumi, the “Hamas Representative in Iran,” and Nasser Abousharif, “representative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement in Tehran.”

This was also not Rasool’s first involvement with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a designated terrorist organization in countries throughout the West.

For many years, Rasool has been involved with a Virginia-based Islamist network named SAFA (also known as the SAAR network), a collection of hundreds of nonprofit and for-profit entities, including banks, thinktanks, journals, and educational institutions. In the 2000s, federal agents investigated SAFA’s support for terror groups such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

According to federal agents and documents uncovered during raids of SAFA and WISE properties, SAFA financed Palestinian Islamic Jihad through the terror group’s U.S front organization, the World Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE), which was led by notorious PIJ financier and Islamist operative Sami Al-Arian.

Al-Arian was later arrested and prosecuted, before being deported to Turkey, from where he now runs a major Turkish-regime backed organization, the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).

CIGA is closely involved with international Islamist activists, academics, terror leaders, statesmen and diplomats – including Ambassador Rasool, a prominent supporter of the group. Indeed, Rasool has also spoken as a guest at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, at the invitation of Al-Arian’s son.

But Rasool’s links to SAFA go beyond a preference for terror financiers such as Al-Arian. The South African diplomat has been closely involved with a number of key SAFA institutions, including the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), the flagship institution of SAFA and one of the most prominent Islamist thinktanks in the world.

Meanwhile, Rasool runs his own organization, the World For All Foundation. This nonprofit may claim to be based in South African, but its U.S. address is registered to a Herndon, Virginia property controlled by the SAFA network in Virginia. The nonprofit’s filings also list Yaqub Mirza, a key SAFA figure, as one of World For All’s “care of” mailing recipient. In 2016, SAFA’s IIIT even reported donating $7,000 to Rasool’s organization.

The SAFA network and Rasool play a key role in the coordination of international Islamism.

One of SAFA’s leading officials, Anwar Ibrahim, is today the prime minister of Malaysia, which he is using as a testing ground for Islamization ideas cooked up at IIIT. Rasool is an old contact of Anwar Ibrahim, and today they are colleagues at Georgetown.

Rasool’s World For All Foundation is a close partner, meanwhile, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, the key clerical body for the international Muslim Brotherhood. Rasool’s joint events with the Islamist body featured leading Islamist extremists from all the world. These conferences were planned with the assistance of SAFA’s IIIT, as well as figures such as Ibrahim El-Zayat, one of the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the West, described by German security services official Hartwig Möller as the “spider in the web of Islamist organizations.”

Even without SAFA and his foundation, Rasool is a magnet for international Islamism. Indeed, in 2013, the first delegation to the United States from the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt reportedly “came directly from the airport to [Rasool’s] residence” in Washington D.C.

Moreover, during his first stint as ambassador to the U.S, Rasool played an outsized role organizing Islamist-run American Muslim organizations.

From the Islamist rulers of Qatar and Turkey to international activist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, Rasool’s influence can be found at the highest radical levels.

Certainly, Rasool’s Islamist allies will welcome his re-appointment as ambassador. It is perhaps noteworthy that just a few months before Rasool was named to the position, Rasool’s partner organization, the Muslim Brotherhood-run IUMS sent a delegation to South Africa, alongside officials from the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (also a long-standing partner of Rasool), the European Muslim Forum and even the radical Irish political party Sinn Fein. The delegation held a joint press conference with top ANC officials, including President Ramaphosa, just a few days after meeting with Rasool.

Western Islamists evidently regard South Africa’s ANC as a vital fellow traveler, and it certainly seems possible that Western Islamist encouragement helped convince the South African government to re-appoint Rasool.

Regardless, the ambassador will find the White House in 2025 a rather different prospect to his experience in the early 2010s. In anticipation of this, Rasool has, in recent interviews, sought to highlight possible concord with the future Trump administration over a mutual “healthy disrespect for Nato” and a less bellicose attitude towards the Russian regime. Rasool also indicated he would “put away the megaphone” on Palestinian issues.

Notwithstanding the perceived Putin apologism, Rasool may have trouble finding friends in the new administration, however. He has previously referred to Trump as “so extreme” and “unfit,” demanded that “Trump’s populism MUST be ended,” and even compared Trump to “Daesh” (the Islamic State).

Today, Ambassador Rasool is a regular contributor to Al-Qalam, a prominent South African Muslim newspaper. The outlet is Islamist, and runs editorials accusing the South African opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), of collaborating with South African Jews to create a “DA Zionist coalition” that is building a “Zionist new world order,” developing a “little Israel” in Cape Town, and working to pave the way for Israeli colonization of the Western Cape, and a secret Jewish secession plan from South Africa.

Such brazenly anti-Semitic rhetoric has apparently not frightened off Rasool, who uses his regular column inches in the paper to discuss a somewhat less forceful, dairy-based paradigm of geo-political analysis:

Notwithstanding the question of Ambassador Rasool’s intellectual heft, even if the ANC and international Islamists are not sending their brightest radical to Washington; Rasool is certainly among international Islamism’s more reputable figures, and he is effective.

Rasool’s ties to international terror and U.S-designated individuals and organizations afford perfectly-reasonable grounds for the United States to reject his appointment. It is rare for a foreign ambassador to be denied. But it is possible. And, with some nudging, the Trump White House is perhaps one of the few administrations audacious enough to make it happen.