Belgium's foreign minister Maxime Prevot says he will summon United States ambassador Bill White for the second time this year, after the ambassador used social media to mock health minister Frank Vandenbroucke.
White posted an AI generated image of Vandenbroucke on Instagram captioned, in French, that it harms all forms of joy of living, and followed it by asking who is Belgium's biggest loser. The jab was aimed at a new health rule requiring adverts for alcoholic drinks to carry the warning that alcohol harms health, a policy Vandenbroucke has championed.
A second summons in the same year
Prevot said it was intolerable for an ambassador accredited in Belgium to attack a member of the Belgian government in this way. His office said White would be called in for a formal meeting in the coming days over the remarks.
This is not the first time Prevot has summoned White over comments about Vandenbroucke. In February, the ambassador publicly demanded that Belgium drop a judicial investigation into three mohels, religious figures who perform ritual circumcision in Antwerp's Jewish community, and accused the government of antisemitism, prompting an earlier reprimand from Prevot that White later described as inappropriate.
Vooruit leader Conner Rousseau, whose own past comments comparing Donald Trump to Hitler reportedly led White to threaten him with US travel restrictions, hit back at the ambassador on social media, saying White knew little about healthcare and was simply following the lead of Trump while putting profit ahead of public health.