NBA Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter has spoken out on human rights issues in Hong Kong and Tibet many times in recent years. As early as this month, he posted a video on the Internet to show that he is walking with the people of Hong Kong. Kanter is about to add the word “Freedom” to his name, namely Enes Kanter Freedom, to celebrate his finally becoming a US citizen.
Kanter’s manager told the Associated Press that Kanter will hold a citizenship oath on Monday (29th) afternoon and will complete the procedure for changing his legal name.
Kanter, who is 29 years old, stateless and believes in Islam, was originally a native Turk. He once issued a statement saying that he was expelled from the Turkish national team for supporting democratic values and publicly criticizing then Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan for corruption. The Turkish passport was cancelled by the authorities in 2017. In 2019, he said he was afraid of being assassinated by the Turkish government after leaving the United States and decided to give up participating in the NBA London competition that year. Since then, the Turkish government has issued many international arrest warrants to Kanter, accusing Kanter of being a member of a terrorist organization and providing financial support to the terrorist organization. Kanter had sought political asylum from the US at that time.
At the beginning of the month, Kanter released a short film in support of Hong Kong people on Twitter. In the film, he put on a T shirt with “STAND WITH” and the Hong Kong regional emblem pattern and said: Hong Kong was once the freest city, but the National Security Law sent generations of young people in. They are jailed only because they exercise their basic rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
In this season’s NBA games, he wore shoes with the words “Free Tibet” and patterns, and advocated boycotting the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
This is not the first time that NBA players have changed their names to include the word “free”. The 42-year-old charity Metta Sandiford-Artest was renamed Metta World Peace by Ron Artest in 2011. The word Metta comes from the Sanskrit word for “kindness”. After the name change, Attis explained in the Los Angeles Times that the name was changed because he was tired of his original name, and when fans hated him, he would curse “I hate Attis.” After the name change, fans can never scold “I hate him.” World Peace”. He changed his name again last year, adding his wife Maya Standiford’s surname to the original surname Attis.
source:
Associated Press, The Guardian
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