If I have one more frite I'm going to puke

Oh Pickle Nation, how I’ve missed you. I resurface in Belgium, where I’ve been for a couple of days, and will be for a few more. I’m in Brussels, meeting with European Union officials and people around the periphery, to talk about energy and climate, and about what the coming year holds for EU-US relations on the subject. Next, I go to Washington to tell people there what people here have said, and to watch their eyeballs roll back into their heads. Then I plan on emailing the people here again and telling them how the Americans reacted to what they said. And on and on, until there is a massive diplomatic crisis into the breach of which I will step, crafting a way forward and, in the process, a sweet post-graduate school job for myself.

Absent though I have been for a few weeks from the Pickle, I will keep you posted as this drama unfolds over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I should tell you that I happened today, by chance, upon a 10,000-person march through the streets of Brussels today, protesting Israel. All over town for the last couple of days, I’ve seen graffiti that wouldn’t pass muster in the US: the swastikas, Hitlers, stars of David, Bushes, and juifs have been playing fast and loose together. And even though someone I was talking with at a bar the other night launched into a whole thing about how if the US did not so blindly support Israel, Israel would be forced to seek peace in earnest, I was not prepared for the drama that unfolded before me outside the Bourse this afternoon.

I came around a corner to find a couple vans full of riot police, and wondered what they were doing there. Then I came out onto a main street that was closed to traffic, to find a couple of hundred fiercely shouting 20- and 30- something men waiving Palestinian flags, and I thought, “well that’s a little racist, to pull out all those jack-booted cops just for a few demonstrating minorities.” And I kept walking, and then I was not so flippant about the presence of riot police. From one side to the other of Boulevard Anspach, which is very large and wide, for as far as the eye could see, were people chanting (my French is improving, but thousands of voices in chorus remains beyond me – I could pick out “Hamas” and “Hezbollah,” among a few other words), marching, and holding improvised signs with things like a really seriously heavily armed lady liberty and the simple but effective swastika followed by equals sign followed by star or David. I walked, mouth agape, for a few minutes until the intermittent explosions and sounds of gunfire (seriously, I have no idea what those were) stoked my fear that someone would talk to me and hear my American accent got the best of, and I abandoned ship.

OK, on to energy and climate tomorrow. I just wanted to share that. It was quite shocking.