Arsenal game removed from China state TV

SHANGHAI China’s state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday removed Arsenal’s Premier League game against Manchester City from its broadcast schedule following Mesut Ozil’s messages that criticized the country’s policy toward its Muslim Uighur minority.

The Global Times Newspaper said on its Twitter account on Sunday that CCTV made the decision after midfielder Ozil’s comments on Saturday had “disappointed fans and football governing authorities.”

Ozil’s posts called Uighurs “warriors who resist persecution” and criticized both China’s crackdown and the silence of Muslims in response.

“(In China) Qurans are burned, mosques were closed down, Islamic theological schools, madrasas were banned, religious scholars were killed one by one. Despite all this, Muslims stay quiet,” Ozil, who is a Muslim, said in his posts.

An Arsenal spokesman told Reuters they had no official statement on the issue after CCTV’S decision to show a taped game between Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers instead of the originally planned fixture.

Arsenal on Saturday tried to distance itself from Ozil’s comments after he posted messages on Twitter and Instagram.

“The content he expressed is entirely Ozil’s opinion,” the official account of Arsenal said in a post on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform. “As a football club, Arsenal always adheres to the principle of not being involved in politics.”

Replies to Arsenal’s Weibo post were angry, with one showing a shredded Ozil soccer jersey next to a pair of scissors and others demanding he be expelled from the club. The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that up to two million people, mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims, have been detained in harsh conditions in Xinjiang as part of what Beijing calls an anti-terrorism campaign.

China has repeatedly denied any mistreatment of Uighurs.