Under a bounty, where’s Biden?
Former Celtic and NBA star targeted by Turkey
If Joe Biden wanted to display strength rather than weakness toward China, he’d have invited former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom to attend his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Yes, he did finally order the shoot down of that Chinese surveillance balloon. But if hovered over the U.S. so long that it looked like it was paying Hunter Biden rent.
Joe Biden would rather take a knee before the Golden State Warriors, which he did when the NBA champions visited the White House last month, than shake hands with a China critic.
The knee down came when Biden knelt in front of the players for a team picture. When he urged Kamala Harris to join him, she responded with the wisest words she has ever spoken as vice president. She said, “I’m not doing that.”
Biden knelt because the Warriors are the wokest team in the NBA, which is the wokest league around. And both are getting rich off China under the wokest (and weakest) of presidents.
The NBA and its teams pull in billions of dollars in revenue from China, which has almost a half a billion television viewers
Kanter Freedom, a naturalized citizen from Turkey, is one of those grateful immigrants who appreciate America for the freedom and opportunity it offers, which is why he added Freedom to his name.
He is out of the NBA now after playing for the Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks, Utah Jazz and Portland Trail Blazers. His departure from the league came after a major stir over his criticism of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party for human rights abuses.
He also attacked Nike, a major NBA advertiser, for its low rent manufacturing deals in China.
For all its lofty comments to the contrary, the NBA does not tolerate criticism of China or its use of slave labor to make products for U.S. companies. China has stopped broadcasting NBA games on its state television network, as it did when a Houston Rockets executive shared a Twitter image supporting Hong Kong protestor in 2019, costing the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars.
Kanter Freedom is contemplating filing suit against the NBA for blackballing him after he was dropped by the Houston Rockets over his criticism of China’s use of slave labor.
It seems that in the U.S .today, a professional athlete like Colin Kaepernick gets rewarded for accusing his country of racism, but another, like Kanter Freedom, gets punished for accusing China of the same thing.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize why I got little playing time and was released,” Kanter Freedom said at the time.
But that is another matter.
Right now, Kanter Freedom has other things to worry about. And one of them is his life.
That’s because Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the authoritarian president of Turkey, has issued a warrant for his arrest. He put Kanter Freedom on his most wanted terrorist list, along with the names of journalists and intellectuals who have been critical of his regime.
Erdogan has also placed a $500,000 bounty on Kanter Freedom’s head, and Kanter Freedom is an American citizen. He called on Biden to do something about it as well to do something for the thousands of people being wrongfully jailed in Turkey.
He said, “We talk about this being the freest country in the world, and we talk about how President Biden cares about human rights all around the world, but when I became a citizen I did not think that President Biden, or president of this country is going to pick a dictator’s side over a U.S. citizen. This is breaking my heart.”
And broken the hearts of a lot of other people as well, beginning with those Biden left behind in Afghanistan and continuing to the broken-hearted parents of all the young people killed by the fentanyl from China that Biden has allowed to come into the country through his open borders.
And there are still two more dreary years to go.