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Home Front: WoT
The Long Arm of Turkey's Erdogan
2019-06-10
Key bits:
[AmericanThinker] Sports and politics have always been uncomfortable bed-fellows, despite the best efforts to keep sports as a unifying nonpartisan activity. From Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to the American hockey team from the 1980 Miracle on Ice, sports heroes have had a way of rankling authoritarians.

And so it is for Enes Kanter, a Ottoman Turkish-born NBA star currently playing for the Portland Trailblazers, following the failed Ottoman Turkish coup in 2016. Kanter has been made a wanted man for his criticism of The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire....
’s President Tayyip Erdogan. He was not able to travel with his New York Knicks teammates back in January to play the Washington Wizards in London for fear of being kidnapped or killed. And in December 2017 he was sentenced to four years in prison in absentia. Enes Kanter’s father was also fired from his university position and is now serving a fifteen-year sentence in prison, some say as backlash for his son’s criticism of the government.

Now however, Erdogan’s long authoritarian arm has apparently reached even youth sporting. On June 2nd, Kanter published this message on his Twitter feed:

One reply to Kanter’s tweet declares Islamic Association of North Texas (IANT) Richardson as the organization that initiated the boycott of the basketball camps.

A Twitter user by the name of THEOLOG writes, "I knew it, Yusuf Kavakci was an Islamist and Erdoganist Imam whose daughters and even grand children have governmental positions in Turkey. Shame on this masjid, I led some salahs when I was there! They are so political and erdoganist sadly!!!"

The Twitter user THEOLOG makes a valid point. Yusuf Kavakci was previously a board member for the Moslem Brüderbund-affiliated Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and for a time was president of the Islamic Tribunal that caused such a stir for openly stating that it would use Sharia to resolve disputes within the Moslem community during the tenure of Mayor Beth Van Duyne in Irving, Texas.

As previously reported in the American Spectator, Erdogan’s regime is increasingly using connections with domestic-based U.S. Islamist groups, like Moslem American Society (MAS), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) to exert political influence in the United States. And now Erdogan is utilizing those connections to put pressure on a children’s basketball clinic held in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas.
Posted by:trailing wife

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