'I am Racist, but...'

Further to the killing of a Paris Saint-Germain racist hooligan by a plainclothes police officer last Thursday evening - killed while trying to attack a Jewish supporter of Hapoel Tel-Aviv, who just happened to be Parisian and a supporter of PSG on most other nights of the year - an 'ultra' on a supporters' site claims that a man hunted down by a group of hooligans might expect to be 'beaten, but certainly not lynched'. Even this lot have a threshold of acceptability. It reminds me of those frat boys featured in the Borat movie who are suing Sacha Baron Cohen for defamation of character. Their avowed racism and misogyny, so thoughtfully displayed for the putative public of Kazakhstan, of course, could not have defamed those same characters all on their own then.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the best excuse ever for the Irish taking one step further away from their so-called Celtic cousins, the Bretons; beloved of 17% of the French electorate at the last count - last week, and whose name was evoked by the PSG thugs at the moment of attack, is himself threatening to sue the public prosecutor for our old friend 'defamation of character'. Said the actress to the Bishop. Of course the only witnesses to this evocation are the Jew and black cop that were under attack and a bystanding journalist from the news-weekly L'Express. Unreliable, all-told. Another far-right hooligan site says that that the slain lout was the 'perfect target, white and poor, no-one will ever lobby for you'. It may be said that 'white trash' as opposed to 'black trash' does not arouse much liberal sympathy (and the use of the second epithet there only emphasises how offensive the much more common first is) but the best way to get this sympathy is not really to run after defenceless individuals in packs after a football match.

Libération on Saturday published a facsimile of a police memo issued before the game, which proved to be remarkably accurate in its prediction of an incident. Probably nothing unusual in this but one imagines that the clueless thugs, indulged as ever by PSG and their overlords at Canal Plus, have been all too easily infiltrated. A look at Scorsese's The Departed, finally released here today, might reveal all.