German Turks warn of racism in angry WC post-mortem

BERLIN: Since Germany humiliatingly crashed out of the World Cup, a team member with Turkish roots has faced a hailstorm of criticism that Muslim and migrant groups charge is openly racist.

Mesut Ozil, 29, quickly become a scapegoat for far-right populists, but the storm escalated when even German football bosses, rather than defend him, suggested the squad may have been better off without him. At the heart of the storm is a political controversy that flared before the World Cup started, when Ozil and his team mate Ilkay Gundogan posed for photos with Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The incident sparked heated debate on whether the young men felt greater loyalty to their birth country Germany or to Turkey, the ancestral home of their families and of a three-million-strong minority group.

While Gundogan, 27, who plays for Manchester City, voiced dismay about the controversy, Ozil, an Arsenal midfielder, further infuriated critics by staying silent on the Erdogan affair. Ozil, a key player in Germany’s victorious campaign in Brazil in 2014, and Gundogan endured jeers and boos on the pitch which, according to Bild daily, reduced Gundogan to tears in the locker room.

But the anger escalated after Germany’s shock first-round defeat to South Korea dismayed the football-mad nation.First off the mark was the anti-Islam and anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has long railed against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance to refugees.

AfD lawmaker Jens Maier charged bluntly that “Without Ozil we would have won!” in a tweet that also featured a picture of a smiling Ozil and the words “Are you satisfied, my president?” The far-right AfD has risen to prominence with such shrill provocations, repeatedly suggesting that the national team should be made up of white, ethnic Germans.But Muslim and other minority groups see the broader finger-pointing as a sign of a dangerous societal drift to the right at a time when immigration is a hot-button political issue.