South Africa accepts Trump’s new US ambassador

South Africa on Monday said it accepted a conservative envoy highly critical of Pretoria as the new US ambassador to the country, amid frayed relations with President Donald Trump. The two countries’ governments have been at odds over a series of international and domestic policies, including South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and the US in March expelled Pretoria’s ambassador. An official told AFP the foreign affairs department had “accepted” Brent Bozell, a right-wing media critic and fervent defender of Israel, adding that an official accreditation ceremony with President Cyril Ramaphosa would take place in April.

A US state department official told AFP that Bozell “looks forward to taking up his post and representing America First foreign policy”. Trump chose Bozell for the job in March last year, saying he would bring “fearless tenacity, extraordinary experience, and vast knowledge to a nation that desperately needs it”. Bozell said at his Senate confirmation hearing in October that he would push Pretoria to end its genocide case against Israel.

He said he would “communicate our objections to South Africa’s geostrategic drift”, citing its relations with Russia, China, and Iran, with whom Pretoria conducted naval exercises in January. A figure of the American right, Bozell is the founder of the Media Research Center, a non-profit group that says it works to “expose and counter the leftist bias of the national news media”. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela toured the US after being freed from prison for his fight against apartheid, Bozell’s non-profit criticised the media for having “never referred to Mandela as a saboteur or terrorist”.

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At his October Senate hearing, Bozell justified the comment by the fact that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was at the time “aligned with the Soviet Union”, adding that Mandela was today the person he had “the most respect for” in South Africa. Bozell’s son Leo Brent Bozell IV was one of almost 1,600 people convicted and sentenced for their role in the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.

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