An NBA player traveling in Europe accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of having him detained in Romania as punishment for criticizing the Erdogan regime.
“We are in Romania and they said they cancelled my passport by [the] Turkish embassy,” Enes Kanter, a center for the Oklahoma City Thunder, said in a video posted on Twitter on Saturday. “The reason behind it is just, of course, my political views and the guy who did it is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey.”
Kanter is a prominent supporter of Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric based in Pennsylvania who Erdogan accused of orchestrating a failed coup attempt last summer. Erdogan, who has arrested journalists and pushed through a constitutional referendum expanding his authority, put out arrest warrants for hundreds of Gulen’s supporters. And Kanter’s family, which lives in Turkey, disowned him.
That didn’t deter Kanter from continuing to attack Erdogan. “You guys know him,” Kanter said in the video. “He has attacked the people in Washington. He is a bad, bad man. He is a dictator and he is the Hitler of our century.”
I’m being held at Romanian airport by Police!! pic.twitter.com/uYZMBqKx54
— Enes Kanter (@Enes_Kanter) May 20, 2017
Kanter was referring to an attack on protestors who had gathered outside the Turkish embassy to criticize Erdogan during his recent visit to the United States. Members of Erdogan’s security detail, with their president watching, beat some of the protesters and scattered the rest, to the anger of U.S. officials.
“This is the United States of America,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., tweeted. “We do not do this here. There is no excuse for this kind of thuggish behavior.”
