To basketball fans, the gentlemen pictured in the title image should be quite familiar.
As you may recall NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom had a lot over the past couple of years, going on national television to daftly finger-wag at Lebron James as he laid responsibility at the feet of the NBA Superstar for the skepticism of and reluctance to take the COVID-19 vaccination.
Freedom was also critical of Lebron and Nike for the, according to him, their complicity via their silence over the plight of the whygars in China. Kanter even used his game sneakers as nightly billboards for his message that was critical of Nike and James.
For those ignorant of the plight of the Uigars, they are a population of approximately 12 million , mostly Muslim, that occupy what’s officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The Chinese government has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and genocide against the ethnic minorities of the north western Xinjiang region. Allegedly, the government has forcibly detained over one million Uyghurs in a network of “re-education camps” that are staffed with armed guard given shoot-to-kill orders for those who try to escape.
With the news of Nets owner Joe Tsai’s financial connections to the harming of the Uyghurs,their plight is once again in the news. There has not been a single television appearance or even a tweet decrying Tsai or the NBA for associating with both he and China. Freedom , who was so critical of the silence of Nike and Lebron James, is now the one who has seemingly lost his voice and his silence is both deafening and ironic.
