For context: he's accused Belgium of being anti-semitic because a couple of Orthodox Jewish mohels are being prosecuted for practicing illicit medicine (i.e. performing ritual circumcision without a medical license). The investigation started after a complaint was filed by a rabbi, so it's hard to chalk this up to anti-semitisim, but that's modern day US diplomacy for you.

The American ambassador to Canada is also a complete clown. It’s pretty obvious he has an audience of one and absolutely loves the flavour of boot black.

> The only point of inauthenticity ...

And that the fuzz "disagreed with detaining them". The real experience involves them doubling, tripling down, etc. and threatening to "find a reason". By their logic, they are never and could never be wrong.

> At the point they ask you to leave for whatever reason and you don't comply, then it becomes trespass and the police can be asked to remove you.

According to the journalists' account, they were never asked to leave.

Though I agree with the rest of your reasoning.

* AIPAC is one of the biggest donors to US political campaigns.

* Entanglement of tech industries

* Israel serves as an outpost of US imperialism in the Middle East.

* Shared understanding with fellow Settler-Colonialist state

* On a related note, it's a country with a big white-reading population in a mostly brown neighborhood.

* Evangelicals believe Israel is where the battle that rings in the Second Coming will happen.

Which is quite ironic, given all the chuds running around and screeching about _free speech absolutism_.

Free speech is your ability to say what you want without interference from the government.

It is not a right to demand that other people answer your questions, especially high-profile people like us ambassador at an official government event.

I'm sorry Mario, your Free Speech is in another Castle!

Europe (which could mean anything from the UK to Belgium to Hungary to Turkey) never had absolute freedom of speech like the US. But yes, even by the US standards to champion freedom of speech, it is in retreat.

> The Streisand Effect is taking effect in here in terms of surpressing a question has lead to many more people finding out about it

The reason why people like this don't care about the Streisand effect is that they are not afraid about a one-time scandal. The value they get out of harassing their victim and potentially having them stop reporting is worth a bad buzz that people will eventually forget.

This is an example of the Bondaz Effect which is a subtype of the Streisand Effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy#Bondaz_...

Freedom250 is essentially another of Trump's fundraising bodies.

The congressionally created organization that was supposed to run the 250th events was America 250 - it was created in 2016 (IIRC). When Trump was re-elected, he spun up Freedom250, redirected funds to it, and started accepting bribes.

I'm a little bit less cynical about it; most police still live with the assumption that all of our allies are trustworthy. If the US says there is a credible threat, they rather exercise caution, and remove the threat.

It's just that the US cannot be trusted anymore, and this will probably be the moment that Belgian police will stop taking US intel as fact.

> Protections have to be in place for the vast majority of people...

And how do those protections work when the current administration doesn't even respect the law, and no one will enforce it against them?

Quite a leap to bring Gaza and Palestine into a discussion about the US ambassor in Belgium.

Why?

Renting a venue for an event usually comes with the right to decide who may attend and who may not. So if the embassy indeed rented the park, then as soon as the ambassador decided the journalists weren't welcome, they were no longer allowed to stay and the Belgian police were correctly doing their duty in making sure they complied and left.

So the article isn't strictly alleging that the ambassador did anything he didn't have the right to do, but uninviting journalists from an event after they ask a question he preferred not to answer and involving the police instead of directly telling them to leave is maybe not the best use of those rights.

Did you actually read the article?

The Belgian police got the information that the person would be an 'active threat' which is just absolutely bizarre and explains the somewhat 'hasty' reaction of the police to quickly remove that person from the event before asking further questions. After they realized their mistake they apologized but of course at that point the journalist wasn't allowed back in.

The ambassador essentially swatted the journalist.

Indeed, I find this story quite interesting (and disturbing) from the Belgian point of view.

Suppose the Belgian government declared the ambassador persona non grata, and sent them on the next plane to Washington. Presumably this would raise their popularity with their own voters, although if Trump noticed he'd throw another temper tantrum. What then?

Europe is mighty, independent, strong and decoupling from the US, but also everything bad Europe does is because the big old meanies in the US made them do it against their will

Sad day when this is number one and highly upvoted. I don't know why they can't use AI to identify posters that leave more than 90% of political postings here, and nicely suggest that at least some of the content be technical. The political postings would be better if they contained at least some technical information, or just go ahead and change the name of the forum to something other than "hackers".

Agreed. I'd add to that, as a Belgian: let the US and americans celebrate their 250 years of independence.

That US ambassador is a known asshole. These "journalists" looks like politically slanted assholes too.

And this isn't tech news and shouldn't be here.

They are not allowed to lie about it though.

Lying to the police that the reporters are an "active threat" is criminal.

The police didn't do something outside of their legal powers, that's not what the question is. It's rather unusual for any ambassador to use force to kick out invited reporters from a function.

> So if Bill White, the US ambassador, pays to rent out the park for, I think it was 2 weeks, they can have whoever they want removed from this public park. Including any reporters.

That would be by private security not police though. You aren't generally arrested for annoying an event organiser.

yep. and anyone not aligning to the anti-american reddit rants here get downvoted. shows you where HN is going.

You are meaningfully misquoting here ("doing their job" not "following orders", which has a different ring to it, at least for me).

Also, apparently they do have brains capable of thinking because: "Eventually, they accepted that we were journalists and that they disagreed with detaining us."

Media Bias Fact Check has them at center-left alignment and high factual credibility, like the Washington Post and Guardian.

The European Correspondent is a legitimate, though young, news organization. I can recommend their newsletter, they write about a nice mix of topics from all across Europe.

Sounds like they had a legitimate question for the ambassador who reacted badly - which is no surprise for someone in this administration.

The way the journalism business is going, open-source investigators and bloggers looking for clout will be the only independent media left.

The American embassy considers them to have sufficient legitimacy to invite them.

Yes, they're a legitimate news organization. They are partially funded by the EU government.

Belgian here, never heard of them/the site

So American, is Bill White a trustworthy ambassador or a political donor looking for clout?

Does it matter? Should they have been kicked out of an event they were invited to for asking a reasonable question? Why are you asking about a news organization and not an extremely fragile man-baby who can't take a tough question?

A natural question to ask – after their very legitimate and important questions have been answered!

(Or are you just trying to derail?)

Do you ask this about all of the alt right slop artists that have been legitimized by the Trump admin? Or only about those who pose adversarial questions to the Trump administration?

Judge for yourself. Why are you asking other people to think for you?