HATE, WITHOUT HANDS:

Behind hate ball: While England shows some improvement, problems have escalated in France, fueled by racism and anti-Semitism (Chuck Culpepper, December 21, 2006, LA Times)

Unlike England, which has spent two decades adamantly face-lifting its soccer to remove all but traces of violence from the stadium experience, much of France felt newfound shock on Nov. 23. That night, Paris St. Germain lost to Hapoel of Tel Aviv, 4-2, in the UEFA Cup, a second-tier, Europe-wide tournament.

Accounts vary somewhat as to the aftermath, but according to witnesses, a notorious pack of PSG fans hounded and threatened a French-Israeli Hapoel fan, shouting anti-Semitic slurs at the fan and racist slurs at the plainclothes police officer who began defending him.

Eventually, the officer fired his gun, killing one fan and wounding another.

The sports daily L'Equipe ran a black front page, and PSG held no home matches for the ensuing 20 days. Authorities postponed indefinitely the Toulouse match of Dec. 3. Before an away match with Lyon on Dec. 10, the team fled town to train. On the morning of Dec. 13, L'Equipe blared the headline, "Tout Le Monde Regarde" ("All the World Watches").

To a nation that deems soccer more marginal than do its neighbors — rousing only when the national team pulls off some feat — the incident spawned newfound debate. To the head of the football federation, the incident left him "shattered."

PSG and Ivory Coast player Bonaventure Kalou, speaking of a locally infamous subgroup of PSG fans known to sit in the Boulogne section of the stadium, told reporters, "This astonishes me that we wait for the death of a man to come to the realization that there were racist supporters and anti-Semitists in Paris. We have been too gentle with them and too lax. That means that today, they're taking the club as hostage."

Watching Paris St. Germain 10 years ago felt foreboding, John Williams of England's University of Leicester said. The fans were in charge of the stadium. Overt racism spewed unchecked toward opposing players from the Boulogne section. There was "the kind of acceptance" of a notoriously scary section "that has just become out of consideration in England over the last decade or so," he said.