Uh oh….somebody is in trouble
NBA player Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz posted a message on social media Thursday in support of ethnic Uyghur people, currently facing the attempted erasure of their culture and identity under communist China.
Gobert is the first NBA player to publicly express support for the Uyghurs and condemn the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has placed as many as 3 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minority people in concentration camps in western Xinjiang province. The last time a person affiliated with the NBA condemned China’s human rights abuses — General Manager of the Houston Rockets Daryl Morey — the NBA lost hundreds of millions of dollars of business with the CCP. Morey apologized for his defense of democracy shortly after making it.
Unlike Morey’s statement last year, which lent support to pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, a challenge to China’s Uyghur camps also directly challenges NBA policy, as the league ran a “training” facility in Xinjiang for years, shut down this summer after widespread international outrage over its existence. An ESPN report revealed physical abuse against trainees to be a common practice at the facility.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has made business with the CCP a priority during his tenure.
Gobert posted an Instagram story last night — a post that disappears after a certain amount of time — with the words “wrong is wrong” written in white over a sky blue background. The flag of East Turkestan, the preferred Uyghur name for Xinjiang, is sky blue with a white Islamic star and crescent in the middle.
https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2020/10/02/nbas-rudy-gobert-becomes-first-player-condemn-china-uyghur-camps/