As accuracy.org first reported on Thursday, just after Robert O’Brien was named National Security Advisor, he was a Rotary scholar at the University of the Free State in South Africa in 1987, a white supremacist institution at the time. O’Brien’s LinkedIn profile states that he speaks two languages: English and Afrikaans. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over Ronald Reagan’s veto in 1986.
Today, The Guardian reports in “Robert O’Brien attended ‘routinely racist’ university in apartheid South Africa,” that “Prof Jonathan Jansen, who was vice-chancellor of the university … between 2009 and 2017, said that at the time O’Brien was a student, the institution was ‘in short … a white, Afrikaans university for people then called Afrikaners – very conservative and routinely racist not only in their policies but in their practices.’ … The national security council did not respond to a request for comment.”
BILL FLETCHER, billfletcherjr at gmail.com
Fletcher is executive editor of GlobalAfricanWorker.com and is former president of TransAfrica Forum.
He said today: “This appointment is obscene. It is not just a matter of the school that O’Brien attended but his assessment of apartheid South Africa condemns him to be a person not from the 21st century, but from the 19th century. Coupled with the offensive and reactionary stand of the Trump administration when it comes to the Palestinian quest — against another apartheid system — for human rights, this appointment is not simply objectionable but displays the flag of the global right-wing populist movement with which Trump is aligned.”
The Guardian also notes: ”Last year the [‘civil rights organisation that mobilizes Afrikaners’] AfriForum CEO, Kallie Kriel, caused outrage when he said that although apartheid was ‘wrong,’ not enough people had been killed during the apartheid era to justify it being called a crime against humanity.
“O’Brien was quoted in a 2017 interview with AfriForum as saying: ‘In my opinion, South Africans are the most hospitable people in the world and I have especially experienced this at [UFS].’
“O’Brien makes no mention of apartheid or his time in South Africa in his book While America Slept.
“O’Brien is reported to have met his wife while at the university.”
