Basketball, NBA, Enes Kanter becomes American: it will be called “Freedom”

Don’t call him alone anymore One’s Edges, will not turn around: the center of the Boston Celtics is now called Enes Kanter “Freedom“. A choice due that of the former Jazz, Thunder, Knicks and Blazers, who lost Turkish citizenship following his opposition to President Erdogan: having obtained US citizenship, he wanted to celebrate by adding the”freedom“to his official name.

What happened

We said a choice, absolutely in line with the battles of civil justice that the athlete has been carrying out for years: it was the 2016 when his name – the original one – ended up on the black list of the enemies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a supporter of the political opponent in exile in the United States Fethullah Gulen after the failed military coup of 15 July. The following year then Kanter became stateless and the Turkish judiciary opened a trial in absentia and requested extradition to Turkey, as told by the player himself. In 2019, Kanter publicly attacked Erdogan and Turkey for military operations launched in Syria against Kurdish militias, in the theater of the country’s decades-long civil war. Kanter even called Erdogan a “new Hitler”. His family in Turkey have publicly disowned him, but he has repeatedly stated that he fears retaliation against them.

The battles of Enes

Therefore “Freedom“will be his surname, while Kanter becomes the middle name. This is not an absolute novelty, since already at the time of the”Orlando bubble“, Kanter had chosen the same nickname when he could. His commitment therefore continues: in addition to opposing Erdogan, Enes has exposed himself to the persecution of Tibetan and Uyghur minorities in China, against child labor and the inequality of treatment between men and women in professional basketball, all in the name of freedom.