Enes Kanter: 'After I leave the court, the fight begins'
ONE OF THE first items on Enes Kanter's schedule when he joined the Portland Trail Blazers in February was a meeting with agents from the local FBI office -- just one among many ways Kanter's life is vastly different from any other NBA player's.
Kanter told the agents about the Interpol red notice that lists him as a wanted man and prohibits him from traveling safely outside the United States. He talked about the man he considers a dictator, Turkey's president Reccip Tayyip Erdogan, and Erdogan's near-pathological desire to see Kanter either imprisoned or dead. He showed them some of the death threats routinely directed his way.
Some of the threats are specific; most aren't. Many of them originate on social media, bubbling up like methane through those fetid cesspits, creating skepticism. Do you take them seriously? is the question Kanter gets most often, and one of the few things with the power to exasperate him. "I've got to," he answers. "Wouldn't you?" This is not, Kanter says, the same as ignoring someone who criticizes his defense or disagrees with an opinion. "You never know," he says. "What if the one I ignore is a lone wolf or just some crazy dude that tries to do something?"
(To be fair, perhaps it's Kanter's delivery that defuses concern. He speaks of the threats, like all the major events of his recent past -- the four years he has been unable to speak to his parents and sister in Turkey, for example -- as if he's reciting details from somebody else's life. He talks about posting a possibly futile Mother's Day message -- "I don't think there's any chance she could see it," he says -- with a resigned smile. "All the pain lives inside you," he says, "but you can't show it on the outside."
He told the FBI agents that Erdogan revoked his passport in 2017 and last year used a Turkish court to indict him on a terrorism charge related to his public dissent and devotion to exiled Turkish cleric and Erdogan critic Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a failed coup in 2016 and whom Kanter visited every two weeks at Gulen's Pennsylvania compound while Kanter was playing for the New York Knicks. He explained how the death threats accelerated earlier this season, when he was unable to travel to London with New York. He mentioned how difficult it is to deal with the threats when your work schedule can be found with only a few keystrokes by anyone in the world.
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins