NBA star Enes Kanter and his team, the Boston Celtics, have been canceled by China following a Twitter post where 6-foot-10 center called Chinese president Xi Jinping a “brutal dictator.”
Dear Brutal Dictator XI JINPING and the Chinese Government
Tibet belongs to the Tibetan people!#FreeTibet pic.twitter.com/To4qWMXK56
— Enes Kanter (@EnesKanter) October 20, 2021
“Under the Chinese government’s brutal rule, Tibetan peoples’ basic rights and freedoms are non-existent,” Kanter added according to CNBC.
“The peaceful Buddhist country of Tibet was invaded by Communists China in 1949,” said Free Tibet website at UMass. “Since that time, over 1.2 million …Tibetans have been killed, over 6,000 monasteries have been destroyed, and thousands of Tibetans have been imprisoned.”
Kanter is a Turkish national, born in Switzerland, who practices Islam.
Shortly after his tweet went live, Tencent, which distributes NBA games in China, made Celtics highlights and live streaming of Celtics games unavailable.
Tencent paid the NBA a reported $1.5 billion in 2019 for the right to broadcast basketball games in China, but the deal immediately ran into trouble “over the Houston Rockets general manager’s tweet in support of Hong Kong’s anti-government protesters,” said NBC News.
Subsequently all NBA games were banned from broadcasting in China for one year.
The current dustup with Kanter only serves to highlight the difficult relationship that the NBA, which likes to virtue signal about human rights, has with a dictatorship that cares about neither human rights nor money.
Previously the NBA has come under fire for helping to enable human rights abuses in China under the aegis of NBA youth training camps in the Xinjiang region of China, where communist authorities run concentration camps designed to reeducate the Muslim majority in the region.
Under pressure, the NBA scrapped the youth training camps in Xinjiang this summer.
“The NBA has had no involvement with the Xinjiang basketball academy for more than a year, and the relationship has been terminated,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum in a letter addressed to Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., according to CBS News.
In response to Kanter’s tweet, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted out a presentation about Tibet under the leadership of the communist Party in China called “#China on a New Journey: A New Chapter of Development for a Happy New Tibet.”
The Event of MFA Presenting #Tibet to the World is successfully held online and offline today. With the theme of “#China on a New Journey: A New Chapter of Development for a Happy New Tibet”, the event tells us Tibet’s story under the leadership of the #CPC. pic.twitter.com/uOzxYqTuOa
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) October 20, 2021
