Basketball analyst and former NBA star Charles Barkley is a national treasure, but even he can stumble into absurd, anti-American talking points. When talking about Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf series, he did exactly that.
Barkley said he doesn’t deal with the “selective prosecution” of countries’ human rights records and that he gets a “chuckle” out of people condemning Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. “You don’t worry about civil rights of people here in the United States,” Barkley said. “But all of a sudden, when guys start taking money, you’re like, ‘Well, I’m worried about civil rights in Saudi Arabia.’”
Charles Barkley responds to Americans who criticize golfers for joining the Saudi-backed LIV tour:
“Why don’t y’all worry about civil rights here in the United States … before we worry about what’s going on in Saudi Arabia?” pic.twitter.com/2OmsH4vyDa
— The Recount (@therecount) July 25, 2022
That Barkley would defend athletes receiving money from Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing spectacle is not surprising, given that he has been negotiating with LIV Golf for a role as an analyst. But putting the U.S. on the same moral plane as a country like Saudi Arabia is ridiculous no matter how you slice it. Among the litany of human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, the State Department lists “unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents.”
What are the big civil rights problems in the U.S. that compare to those? Barkley doesn’t say. Most liberal media figures who trot out this line are referring to claims from the Black Lives Matter movement and the myth that unarmed black men are being regularly and disproportionately targeted by police officers. (And yes, it is a myth).
Is Barkley referring to voting laws? That is what ESPN contributor J.A. Adande offered as justification for saying the U.S. is no different than China’s genocidal regime. But the tantrum thrown by Democrats over voting laws in Georgia and Texas had nothing to do with voter suppression and everything to do with energizing their voting base. Unless there is another civil rights issue to which Barkley is referring that hasn’t popped up in the news, he is using the talking points of partisan liberal activists to compare the U.S. to Saudi Arabia’s forced disappearances and torture.
People are concerned about athletes taking millions in Saudi money because taking money from authoritarian regimes to help their propaganda campaigns is morally wrong. If Barkley doesn’t agree, he should say that rather than pretend anything the U.S. does compares to the routine, systemic human rights abuses committed by countries such as Saudi Arabia and China.
