Turkish Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan published photos on his social media accounts on Tuesday appearing to play basketball with retired NBA star and commentator Shaquille O’Neal in Istanbul.
Erdogan, one of the world’s most vocally pro-Hamas heads of state with a long track record of repressing political dissidents, captioned his photos with only a series of basketball emojis. O’Neal appeared in workout gear, as did the president, signing basketballs on a court.
While O’Neal has appeared in Turkey in the past, most recently for a DJ gig as his alter ego “DJ Diesel,” those appearances did not appear to be political endorsements of Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). O’Neal’s emergence in the country follows increasingly violent actions by the Erdogan regime to silence dissent, including the arrest last year of his most popular presidential rival, the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu.
Erdogan’s authoritarianism also dramatically affected the NBA during the career of human rights activist Enes Kanter Freedom, a Turkish member of the Hizmet Islamic movement which Erdogan crushed politically, claiming it to be a terrorist organization. Erdogan’s attempts to manipulate Interpol and other international venues into silencing Hizmet have diminished somewhat after the death of its leader, Erdogan’s former political ally Fethullah Gülen, in 2024. Gülen was 83 years old.
The office of the Turkish presidency offered few details regarding O’Neal’s exchange with Erdogan. Daily Sabah, an Erdogan-friendly Turkish newspaper, detailed that the meeting occurred at the Turkcell Basketball Development Center in Istanbul and declared it a “striking snapshot of sports diplomacy.” The two “posed together and exchanged signed basketballs, a simple gesture that carried symbolic weight in a country where basketball has grown into a national passion.”
Adding to the intrigue was the reported presence of Erdogan’s spy chief, Ibrahim Kalın of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Kalin served for many years as Erdogan’s spokesman before leading the intelligence agency; Sabah noted that no details have been made public of the conversation among the three.
O’Neal has not previously been a public supporter of Erdogan or the AKP. Sabah noted that he has visited the country in the past, however. “DJ Diesel,” O’Neal’s longstanding DJ persona, performed at the Istanbul Festival of music in August, alongside other top Western acts such as Jennifer Lopez. Erdogan has dramatically curtailed the freedom of expression of musicians and other artists in his country — pop star Gulsen was notably placed under house arrest in 2022 for a joke at the expense of Islamic schools — though no evidence surfaced following the Istanbul Festival that O’Neal was subject to those same speech limitations.
Erdogan has a longstanding record of authoritarianism, imprisoning presidential rivals, and taking civilians hostage for political benefit. Americans have not been an exception. In 2016, for example, the Turkish government imprisoned American Pastor Andrew Brunson on a mess of charges that framed him as an atheist communist, a devout Hizmet Muslim, and a Christian agitator all at the same time. Erdogan openly spoke of Brunson as a hostage, taken in the hopes of exchanging him for Gülen, exiled at the time in Pennsylvania. President Trump maneuvered the release of Brunson in 2017 through economic efforts against Turkey.
In addition to the persecution of Christians and Muslims not loyal to the AKP, the persecution of Imamoglu, of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), has also prompted a wave of arrests. Over 1,110 people were arrested by the end of March last year during a wave of peaceful protests calling for Imamoglu’s release. The mayor remains behind bars at press time.
Erdogan’s repression became a problem for the NBA during the ascent of the career of Enes Kanter Freedom, who was ultimately elbowed out of the league after criticizing the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Turkic people in East Turkistan. As Kanter Freedom described to Congress in June:
Since I became outspoken, I have personally endured 12 arrest warrants, a revoked passport, and a $500,000 bounty on my head — experiences shared by many Turkish Americans. My father was imprisoned. My mother was recently detained. In 2017, I narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt in Indonesia and was nearly arrested in Romania.
Kanter Freedom described the NBA community as supportive of his activism against Erdogan in an interview with Breitbart News in 2024, but abruptly becoming combative toward him when he called for support for the Uyghur and other Turkic people suffering Chinese genocide.
“This is a human rights issue. We’re talking about 3 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps right now, getting tortured and raped every day,” Kanter Freedom explained. “And, I had a conversation with Adam Silver, I had a conversation with so many of my teammates. They said, ‘Well,’ especially my teammates, they said, ‘Well, we love you. We support you. But we just cannot do it out loud… Well, we have shoe deals. We have endorsement deals.’”
Kanter Freedom and O’Neal met in 2017, which the former called an “honor.”
While O’Neal was supportive of other anti-China voices in the NBA, such as Philadelphia 76ers Operations President Daryl Morey, who was with the Houston Rockets at the time, he was dismissive and critical of Kanter Freedom in 2021, responding to criticism he leveled against NBA legend Michael Jordan.“I understand your beef with LeBron, but don’t be talking about what Mike does for the black community. I don’t know his name, I’m not memorizing his name, I don’t give a sh*t what he change his name to,” O’Neal railed in a podcast interview at the time.
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