The National Basketball Association has announced that it is partnering with yet another oppressive regime as it continues its development deal with Abu Dhabi, a country with a history of human rights violations.
Despite media inquiries over when the far left-wing sports organization would partner with a country that suppresses political dissent, religion, and free speech, NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum tried to walk a tightrope over the issue by claiming that the league somehow opposes human rights abuses, yet still has no problem teaming up with Abu Dhabi.
“We condemn human rights violations wherever they occur,” Tatum said, according to the New York Times. Tatum added that the league’s “engagement through sports” is “overwhelmingly positive,” as if that “engagement” might help bring the Muslim country into line with Western values.
Indeed, that claim has been a mainstay of the NBA. Even as it continues to partner with oppressive regimes, such as China and Rwanda, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has tried to claim that this “engagement” will bring oppressive regimes toward reform.
In 2021, Silver claimed that “engagement is better than isolation” when dealing with China.
“I’ll take a step back there and restate the NBA’s mission, which is to improve people’s lives through the game of basketball. And we think exporting NBA basketball to China and to virtually every country in the world continues to fit within our mission. The political science major in me believes that engagement is better than isolation. That a so-called boycott of China, taking into account legitimate criticisms of the Chinese system, won’t further the agenda of those who seek to bring about global change. Working with Chinese solely on NBA basketball has been a net plus for building relationships between two superpowers.”
This is a weak excuse when the NBA has spent years supporting efforts to criticize America and Americans who they think are not sufficiently progressive on left-wing social issues.
This is the same pabulum that Silver doled out to the media in 2019 when the left-wing NBA rose as a whole to smack down former Houston Rockets manager Daryl Morey, who dared to post a simple tweet reading “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong,” in support of the pro-democracy movement trying to keep freedom alive after Red China took the county over from Great Britain.
The league’s deep-pocketed Chinese partners were furious at Morey over the message, and Silver and company immediately pressured the Rockets to disavow his wish for democracy. A year later, he was out as the Rockets’ GM.
In the end, it is clear the money talks far louder than the NBA’s purported “progressive” values, and that the league only feels disposed to press its “values” on soft and easy targets in the U.S. At the same time, it ignores even worse violations by its high-dollar partners.
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