You learn a lot about a place based on what it allows to become a scandal. During last Wednesday’s Champions League match in Paris pitting Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG) against Atlético de Madrid, PSG ultras unfurled a massive bleacher-spanning banner condemning Israel’s ongoing war in Palestine and Lebanon. The banner depicts a militant with a face covered by a keffiyeh and a child viewed from the back draped in a Lebanese flag, both looking toward Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. “Free Palestine” was sprawled in massive font at the center of the tifo (mass banner display), with “war on the football field, peace in the world” written just below.
The demonstration was a “a call for peace between peoples,” wrote the PSG ultras collective in a public statement the following day. But by that point, the tifo had, in mainstream media at least, become yet another sign of subliminal “antisemitism” and terrorist apologism. The president of France’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group took to X/Twitter to demand that “the people behind the banner . . . be sanctioned.”
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau was also quick to intervene, calling the tifo “unacceptable” and arguing that politics should not “tarnish” sporting events. On Friday, representatives of both PSG and the French Football Federation were summoned for a meeting at the sports ministry in the presence of Othman Nasrou, state secretary for citizenship under the interior ministry. That the night before in Amsterdam had seen street battles between Israeli ultras and locals was no doubt part of the uptick in tone from French government officials, eager not to be caught out of step as the news cycle swirled around football-related violence.
Denying prior knowledge of…
Auteur: Harrison Stetler
