Ozil shoots himself in the foot over Xinjiang

Mesut Ozil is the poster boy of the moment for critics of Beijing's policies in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, which is a pity because he has muddied the waters with his own poor grasp of geopolitics and thus made things worse for the people he ostensibly cares about.

It's true that the Arsenal midfielder's Twitter post touches on humanitarian concern for Uygurs in China's northwest region of Xinjiang. But as Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, the German-Turkish soccer player should visit Xinjiang and see for himself.

By wrapping his message in the "flag of East Turkestan", Ozil has scored an own goal, greatly undermining his reputation as a smart, mercurial player. Indeed, his emotional, unconsidered tweet risks damaging the very cause he claims to espouse by putting separatism on a par with social justice.

In today's world, East Turkestan has come to mean a breakaway independent region with the "blue flag" as its standard. This is the flag being waved by Mesut Ozil and other proponents of pan-Turkism that would like to see partly Muslim Xinjiang taken out of China's orbit and united culturally, if not politically, with Turkey.

East Turkestan is a virtual state, alive only in the minds of identity-intoxicated dreamers, mostly in the Uygur diaspora, but that's not to say it's not a provocation. China is within its right to be concerned about the "East Turkestan Liberation Organization" and the "Gray Wolves", both founded in Turkey. And China has produced evidence of the terrorist acts committed by the separatists in Xinjiang.

The United States' position, recently reiterated and made clear by the highly partisan US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is an odd one, especially because the US leads the world in combating Islamist terrorism, real and imagined, and it is still waging war on Islamic nations.

Since Sept 11, 2001, China has been generally supportive of US efforts to root out terrorism wherever the US claims to find it. But US policy is full of double standard. A month after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I attended a US embassy briefing in Beijing. When I asked the US spokesman why the US continued to support Islamic separatists in China, he said, "it's different".

And that has pretty much been the US line ever since. Anti-Beijing supporters of separatism who lean toward the US are given a free pass. It's a reaffirmation of a consistent flaw in US foreign policy-hypocrisy. One need only consider the brutal US-backed Contras who ravaged Nicaragua to grasp that bitter irony that one man's terrorist is indeed another man's freedom fighter.

Where the former German soccer star Ozil really trips up as a booster for the "Uygur cause" is in his flag-waving support for pan-Turkism. This is a toxic creed in the same way that pan-Germanism is, and Ozil, being a German citizen of Turkish descent, should know better.

In China, the reaction to his invocation of free East Turkistan was predictably fierce. Soccer matches have been yanked off the air, Ozil soccer shirts burned, and Ozil's likeness is getting airbrushed out of video games.

If Ozil cared a little more about democratic politics, he wouldn't have foolishly wrapped his message in the flag of a separatist group that wants to carve a big chunk out of China.

If Ozil knew a little more about Turkish history, the land of his grandparents, he might take pause at the shocking "movement", in which pan-Turkism instigated ethnic cleansing and racial "purifying" that all but wiped from the map the ethnic Armenian neighbors of his Turk ancestors. Armenia longs for the world's condemnation on this massacre which is denied by Turkey.

Finally, he might face the hard-to-stomach reality that today's Kurds did much to defeat the Islamic State group while Turkey played dumb, looking the other way.

He might also take note that the Kurds, using similar reasoning to his, lay claim to large parts of his beloved Turkey, and if they had their way, an independent Kurdistan would be carved out of the Anatolian land.

Ozil is not alone. His one-sided thought process aligns rather well with the US administration's view of the world. To President Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a buddy and the Kurds deserve to be betrayed and left dangling. Along with the implicit support of the US, Ozil can look forward to partisan support in journalistic quarters where the anti-China agenda trumps balanced reporting.

The West excoriated the Chinese media for criticizing Ozil without saying clearly why he was being treated as an anathema. But Western accounts have big narrative holes, too. Whether by omission or commission, or just bad editing, the Western media left out Ozil's naked embrace of the incendiary "blue flag" of separatist East Turkestan from most reports on the topic.

If a soccer player had used the platform of fame to advocate secessionism and independence of a US state using the Confederate flag as backdrop, he or she would have deservedly been hit with a red card. But when it comes to China, which has recently become a popular piñata for US politicians looking to smack hard without taking too close a look at the facts, the bashing has already begun.

The author is a media researcher covering Asian politics. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.