During a recent interview with PBS’s
Margaret Hoover, the NBA’s Enes Kanter Freedom predicted that he’d soon be
banished from the league due to his outspoken support for China’s persecuted
Uighurs and criticism of that nation’s abysmal human rights record. “Soon”
turned out to be about 24 hours. The Boston Celtics traded him to the Houston
Rockets on February 10th, whereupon the Rockets cut him outright.
This was obviously no coincidence. Kanter Freedom played for a league utterly
beholden to China, a league that would do anything for China’s massive market
and the massive cash that it can reap from it.
At one point during his interview,
Hoover asked Kanter Freedom, “Do you think they’re trying to silence you?” He replied,
“Oh, for sure they are.” And
they have.
Enes Kanter became an American
citizen last year, and proudly so. He decided to officially change his name to
Enes Kanter Freedom to mark the occasion and publicly tout his love of America
and the freedoms it promised. Perhaps he knows better now.
NBA and NFL teams allow— indeed encourage—their
players to literally wear social justice messages on their sleeves…and
helmets and jerseys and shoes. They can lament the fate of drug-addled
criminals, praise looters and vandals, and call for the defunding of law
enforcement, but are absolutely forbidden, apparently, from calling attention
to an ongoing genocide?
The only legitimate response to
leagues as hypocritical, disingenuous-- and evil-- as this would be to loudly
tell them to “Eff off forever.” But that would require valuing someone else’s
freedom over one’s own desires and success. And that would take
integrity, something Enes Kanter Freedom has in spades. The rest of us? Apparently,
not so much.
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