Celtics forward Jaylen Brown blasted billionaire Brooklyn Nets Owner Joe Tsai as a hypocrite for continuing his attacks on Kyrie Irving because Tsai is an unapologetic supporter of the genocidal Chinese regime.
Kyrie Irving was unequivocally wrong for posting a link to a movie that contained antisemitic disinformation, and discipline for that is entirely appropriate. The man meting out much of that punishment, however, Nets Owner Joe Tsai, is an open supporter of a country that has one of the worst human rights records in the world, and Jaylen Brown is sick and tired of hearing the Taiwan-born, ethnic Chinese NBA owner moralizing as if he has a leg to stand on.
After Monday’s game, Brown turned his attention to the ongoing attacks on Irving repeatedly launched by his boss. Brown called Irving’s problems an “alarming” situation.
While Irving’s initial punishment was announced as a five-game suspension, Chinese owner Joe Tsai piled on six conditions Irving will have to meet to be allowed to return.
“[Tsai’s] response was alarming to me,” Brown said on Monday night, adding, “He didn’t say that the organization was working together to get Kyrie back on the floor. He said that [Kyrie] had more work to do.”
Brown went on to note that Tsai has some troubling ties of his own.
“And our society has more work to do, including Joe Tsai. It’s 2022. It takes 10 minutes of time to see who these business owners, corporations etc., who they’re associated with and who they’re doing business with, who they’re affiliated with,” Brown said.
Brown is vice president of the NBA players association, a group that also censured Irving for linking to the antisemitic film. But, clearly, Brown thinks it is time to get past this incident and let Kyrie get back to playing basketball.
In any case, Brown is right. Joe Tsai is not only silent about China’s horrendous record of human rights abuses, he openly supports and sells ties to the criminal nation.
According to a recent report at Human Rights Watch, China is still one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights. In its 2018 report, the organization reported that China has “dramatically stepped up repression and systematic abuses against the 13 million Turkic Muslims, including Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.”
“Authorities have carried out mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment of some of them in various detention facilities, and increasingly imposed pervasive controls on daily life,” HRW wrote. “New regulations in Tibet now criminalize even traditional forms of social action, including community mediation by religious figures. In Hong Kong, a region promised ‘a high degree of autonomy’ under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments hastened their efforts in 2018 to undermine people’s rights to free speech and political participation.”
HRW also reiterated China’s oppression of homosexual citizens, refugees, asylum seekers, women, and girls, not to mention its actions against Tibet.
This is the country that Joe Tsai and the NBA are falling all over themselves to support.
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