Nidra Poller has much, much more on what happened. First, from the day of the event:
After carefully gathering and crosschecking every available scrap of information, this is the closest I can get to an accurate account of the chain of events.
Yanniv Hazout—Israeli or more likely a Jewish Frenchman carrying or wrapped tifosi-style in an Israeli flag—was leaving the stadium with four or five friends when a gang of about 150 men described as PSG fans started to chase them. (This was the clue I missed before my morning coffee; the gang was never described as “youths.â€) Philippe Broussard of l’Express, former sports journalist and expert on hooliganism, who witnessed the attack, describes the crowd as an extremely violent dangerous horde, shouting racist and anti-Semitic insults. One source claims that Yanniv and his friends decided to break up…but I find that hard to believe. I’ll have to wait until the Jewish media get the full story on that. Yanniv was alone when Broussard saw the policeman trying to protect him, telling him “stay behind me, stay behind me.†Someone else describes Yanniv pulling the policeman’s sleeve, trying to guide him over to a McDonald’s on the far side of Porte St. Cloud Square.
Granomort, who is assigned to the transport brigade, was not on duty at the stadium that night. One report says he was watching over the parked police cars. Hopefully he will tell his side of the story when he is released from police custody. Knowing what we know of people battered senseless or kicked to death, of policemen ambushed, attacked with iron bars, getting their heads smashed, we can measure the courage of Antoine Granomort who risked his life to protect a young man bearing an Israeli flag in Paris in this day and age.
He could have left Yanniv to his sorry fate. No one would have blamed him. Who would have even known there was a plainclothes policeman in the vicinity?
Granomort tried to hold the attackers off with tear gas. He emptied his canister. They advanced, undaunted. They knocked him down, or he tripped and fell. He was kicked in the head and groin. Did he get up, or shoot from the ground at someone who was about to kick him senseless? No reliable eyewitness testimony has been made public on that detail. He says he warned them that he was a policeman. Then fired one shot.
He and his protégé ran into the Macdonald’s on the other side of Porte St. Cloud Square. The enraged mob followed them. Smashed the windows. The policeman, the Hapoel fan, and a few customers ran to the second floor of the restaurant.
Broussard speculates that the mob didn’t come into the restaurant because they were afraid they would be trapped inside. Maybe, maybe not.
Next, from further research and more witnesses:
Ok, now we have all done some in-depth investigations. I’ll begin with my own. Eyewitness—a young security guard in front of a synagogue Saturday morning. Of course he had seen the PSG-Hapoel game. The atmosphere was okay during the game…there were so many Jews. But when we came out of the stadium they were harassing us, roughing us up, calling us “sales feujs†[dirty kikes], taunting, “Where are your flags, huh? Afraid to show them now?†It was going on all over the place. The CRS [riot police] just stood there and watched.
He saw the beginnings of the incident at Porte St. Cloud…and didn’t linger. There were no problems in the metro because there were so many transportation security police. He wonders…if Hapoel had lost the game would the PSG fans have been so aggressive?
Interviewed by the AFP, Patrick Bittan, martial arts instructor at the GIGN [elite commando force of the Gendarmerie] gives a more dramatic description of Jews forced to pass through tightly structured gauntlets. “They asked if we were Jewish, or just said ‘Jew’ to see how we reacted, they looked in people’s bags to see if they had an Israeli flag, something Jewish. I saw two or three guys really get hit.â€
The missing link. And yet it’s so obvious. Of course it was not one incident, not one or even five Hapoel fans, it was Jews in general who were hassled. Libération reports that the kops of Boulogne, who usually pick fights with the banlieusards of the Auteil tribune, forgot their rivalry and went after the Jews. Rumors had circulated that the Betar and the Jewish Defense League were going to arrive in force. Yeah, sure. That’s what the K tribe said when they marched into the Jewish quarter in paramilitary formation. So the skinheads and the punk jihadis had to rough up Jews to prevent a Betar-JDL massacre?
Yanniv Hazout was interviewed on TV. All they showed was his jeans and shoes—Nikes or Adidas, I couldn’t tell. He expressed his gratitude to the policeman who rescued him. Just looking at his shoes you could tell the young man was still in shock from his brush with death. Hazout says Granomort shouted loud and clear that he was a policeman, and ordered the mob to back off. He showed his gun. Someone mocked him, “it’s not a real gun.†They thought they had easy prey, a jackpot, a Black and a Jew. Granomort warned several times before shooting.
Shyeah. That was just like a crowd of New Yorkers shouting at someone in a Red Sox cap at a Yankees game. Well, except for the beatings and the threat of death and the anti-Semitic and racial epithets, of course. But really, it was just like a typical scene in the Bronx. Which I once witnessed, in fact, and saw the police at Yankee Stadium take the New York fan away and arrest him for trying to beat up a Red Sox fan. Compare that to the French riot police standing around and doing nothing, and you have to admit, this situation is just like that fictional Yankee game mentioned in the link above.
Well, let’s compare:
Yankee game: I said “you’ll get shouts of “kill the Bastard†and maybe some shoves”
French Game: “they were harassing us, roughing us up, calling us “sales feujs†[dirty kikes]” (It was at this point that “the CRS just stood there and watched.”)
Continuing, when it turns violent:
Yankee game: you said you “saw the police at Yankee Stadium take the New York fan away and arrest him for trying to beat up a Red Sox fan.”
French Game: A police office came to protect the Jewish fan and confronted the attackers.
SO far, all you’ve shown is the Soccer hoologanism is more intense than baseball hooliganism, but that should come as no surprise to anyone — lest we forget the El Savalador & Honduras fought a war started over a soccer game (Yes, I know the The Football War http://www.answers.com/topic/football-war was fought over bigger issues than a soccer game, but the game was the trigger).
Still the important point is that you had three basic premises to your original article, none of which you’ve fully proven.
1) That the attack was based on ethnic reasons and not sports reasons.
2) That the attack was based on the victim being Jewish and not merely non-French.
3) That the actions of one group — known for their violence — is indicitive of all French citizens.
Even if we grant the first two (which the second article gives some, but not conclusive supprt to), there’s stil quite a jump to the third.
You say you can make this jump based on “factual backup of the statements that [you] make.” — except making it requires to to specifically disregard the factual information given in the top of your message — based on one incident.
Consider this:
You say: I’ve flipped a coin hundreds of times, and it’s always come up heads.
I say: I’ve replaced your fault two-headed coin with a proper one. It will now sometime come up tails. In fact, I just flipped it, and it came up tails.
You say: I don’t believe. See, I just flipped it and it came up heads.
Jamie, can you not even read? In the third paragraph of the second quote:
Here’s the thing. If I didn’t know you, I’d say you were a typical troll, whose only purpose is to contradict everything he sees in the posts on this weblog.
But I know you, so I have let you slide. But I am tired of your bullshit. It is not my job to bring you up to speed on the topics I’ve been discussing in the five years I wrote this blog before you got here. It is your job to come to the discussion with a modicum of knowledge about the subject. A simple check through my archives, searching on “France” or “French” would give you the background you need in order to discuss French anti-Semitism in an intelligent manner. At the very least, you should be able to read the article I am quoting with some form of reading comprehension before posting yet another contrarian comment.
As for your points, I have proven 1 and 2. 3 is entirely in your head. I never said to base your opinion of France on this one incident. Go read up on French anti-Semitism and then come back and discuss it with me. You can find plenty of posts about it on my weblog. Here’s a hint for you: Read up on Ilan Halimi.
I have reviewed your comments on this blog to see if it was fair to say that the majority of your comments are simply contradicting whatever is posted here.
It is.
As of this moment, you are one more comment away from being banned as a troll.
You want to argue with everything I and my cobloggers write on this blog, fine. Do it on your own dime, and on your own blog, where I can ignore your ignorance and your deliberate misinterpretations of what I write. Because I’m damned sick of seeing it here.
Yes, I can read. Can you?
In ther words, you haven’t proven 1 & 2, but I’ll concede that it’s a reasonable assumption.
Which bring us to point three, which you say is in my mind, and I say was the entire point of you message. To review, you spent half the post quoting an article claiming the French anti-semitism is declining, which you conclude with “I didn’t post about it becase I don’t really believe it. Turns out I was right:“. The rational conclusion is that the second half of the message is offered as evidence of your premise which is that the article cited at the top is wrong.
Now, if you claim that was not the premise of your message, then it was a rather funny way of framing your point. (And I’ll get back to this in a moment)
But, first, we must talk about the tone of my comments here. Yes, most of them challenge the premise of the message. And this is surprising to you? What do you expect the comments to be? If I agreed with the message (and there are plenty that I do agree with), what’s the point of commenting? To tack on a “Me too!” or “That’s Right!”. Are you so insecure that you need a cheerleader?
Which finally bring us to my so-called “deliberate misinterpretations” of what you write, which are nothing of the sort. The problem is that, while you are good at research & reporting, you just not very good at forming a logical argument — one that will stand that will stand up to debate. I’m here just tring to point out the flaws in your logic.
For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never wanted to defend what you write — you just expect the reader to accept it implictly, even if the dots don’t connect.
Which goes to the larger issue: What is the point of this site? Are you just trying to impress a bunch of sycophants, or are you trying to actually change someone’s mind?
One would like to think it’s the latter, but your attitude toward dissent indicates it’s the former.
Jamie: Buh-bye. You’re banned.
Okay, that deserves a longer explanation.
You are wrong.
There are many examples of debates and discussions on this site. The real problem is that you do not know how to carry out a logical argument. If you did, I’d have no problem discussing events with you. In every discussion, you say I have not proven my point. I then point out facts that prove my point. You then say, “No they don’t!” and insist on my giving you yet more information—from the single source of information in my post. You then impute things to me that I have not said and say they were “implied.” Since when is inferral a logical debate tool?
You are, quite frankly, full of shit.
It is not my job in life to satisfy your debating requirements.
But I would like to quote from a news article that hit the wires just yesterday:
But gee, the facts don’t bear out my suspicions—earned from years of reading hundreds of information pieces about European anti-Semitism, from discussing anti-Semitism with Jews from all over the world (who are experiencing it first-hand, and who are getting no help from the police in their countries), and from reading the raw data itself.
I am not the person that I was when you were on my BBS in 1987. That was twenty years ago. You, however, don’t seem to have changed much from the annoying twit you were in college.
You are done here. Go find someone else to annoy.