Real Madrid and Germany midfielder Toni Kroos has said he was perceived as a “Nazi” after he criticized former teammate Mesut Ozil over his bitter exit from international football.
Ozil quit the German team in the aftermath of their ignominious exit at the group stage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, claiming he had been made a scapegoat for Germany’s failings and that he was the target of racism at numerous levels due to his Turkish heritage.
Kroos – who won the World Cup alongside Ozil in Brazil in 2014 – was critical of the way in which the playmaker handled his departure, saying at the time that “Mesut is a deserved international and as a player he deserved a better departure. But the way he resigned was not in order.
“The parts in his statement that are rightly addressed are unfortunately overshadowed by the significantly higher amount of nonsense.
“I think he knows very well that racism within the national team and the DFB (German football federation) does not exist.”
Speaking in an Instagram Live chat with German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the 31-year-old Real Madrid star has now claimed he was branded a Nazi for those comments.
“After the 2018 World Cup I said that I did not like the retirement of Mesut Ozil and the manner in which he did it,” Kroos said, Goal reported.
“And then I was directly a Nazi for a lot of people: blond, blue eyes … everything fit for a lot of people.
“I managed to overcome it, anyone can hide behind a fake profile and then insult other people without anything to stop them.”
Ozil went from being crowned his nation’s player of the year for five out of six seasons in 2011-2016, before becoming something of a pariah.
Germany’s build-up to the World Cup in Russia was overshadowed by accusations of mixed loyalties and questionable conduct after Ozil and teammate Ilkay Gundogan – also a German international of Turkish heritage – were photographed with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ozil was unrepentant and has grown closer to Erdogan, even having the Turkish president as the best man at his wedding.
The 32-year-old star left Arsenal in January to join Turkish giants Fenerbahce.
Kroos, meanwhile, continues to play for Germany and reached 100 caps for his country in their game against Switzerland in October.
Real Madrid and Germany midfielder Toni Kroos has said he was perceived as a “Nazi” after he criticized former teammate Mesut Ozil over his bitter exit from international football. Read Full Article at RT.com Read More
The mid-20th-century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr would have recognized the irony of a foreign policy that continually enters alliances (both covertly and overtly) with groups and causes that are themselves the very antithesis of the values that the US foreign-policy and defense establishments claim they are defending the world over. Over the past several years, the weaponization […]
In 2002, President George W. Bush cited the now famous “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—as he tried to get the American people to look beyond those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and greenlight a global military campaign to “rid the world of the evil-doers.” The result was the $8 trillion global war on terror that continues to […]
Representatives of the civil-military administration of the Zaporozhie region announced that Ukrainian troops use artillery with NATO ammunition in attacks on the Energodar nuclear power plant. “The latest attacks on Saturday in the last week of August were carried out with 155-millimeter shells of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with American M739 fuses,” the […]
