Muslim Baller Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Throws Ungentlemanly Elbows at Ben Carson

NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, writing at the time.com website, delivered so many sharp elbows at 2016 GOP Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, that one might wonder whether the former Los Angeles Laker has decided to dump his gentlemanly image on the court once and for all.

Dr. Carson’s allegedly “repressive, muddled and pious policies and opinions often run against our Constitution—but his questionable proposals will likely, thankfully, be doomed by his lack of political expertise,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Carson perpetuates the black stereotype of someone who’s too confused or frightened by all that complicated science, so he or she ignores it, clinging to superstitions or religion.”

The former Lew Alcindor, who took the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his conversion to Islam, ticks off a laundry list of Dr. Carson positions, beliefs and life experiences that are troubling to the onetime hoops star. He noted Dr. Carson has decried overdependence on government assistance: “We must not allow their sacrifice to become meaningless by allowing ‘do-gooders’ to replace the chains of overt racism with the new chains of dependency, low expectations, victimhood and misdirected anger.” Abdul-Jabbar then notes that Dr. Carson’s mother raised Ben and his brother with help from the government, thus making Dr. Carson a hypocrite. Abdul-Jabbar fails to entertain the notion that, having seen welfare from the inside, Dr. Carson might want better for others facing challenging circumstances.

Without citing a single statement Dr. Carson has made on the subject, Abdul-Jabbar declares—on the basis of actions by Presidents George W. Bush, whom he opposed, and Barack Obama, whom he enthusiastically supported—that “Ben Carson, who defers to his religious faith in the face of scientific evidence, does not seem like a strong advocate for quality education.”

Ironically, Dr. Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist, is the product of public education in Detroit, was the city’s top ROTC Cadet during his high school years and won admission (and a scholarship) to Yale University, from which he graduated with a degree in psychology. Dr. Carson then attended the University of Michigan’s medical school, earning a M.D. degree there. As head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Dr. Carson was also a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics at Hopkins.

According to the Johns Hopkins University website, Dr. Carson has received more than 30 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities around the globe. In Detroit, a high school specializing in science and medicine is named after Dr. Carson. Outside of Lagos, Nigeria, the Benjamin S. Carson School of Medicine was opened to provide medical instruction to students at Adventist-owned Babcock University.

If you see a disconnect between Abdul-Jabbar’s assertions and Dr. Carson’s reality, you’re not the only one. The former basketball player’s apparent political bias is woven into almost every sentence. When he quotes Dr. Carson as saying, “I think black Americans over the course of this next year will begin to see that they have been manipulated very, very largely,” Abdul-Jabbar doesn’t allow for the possibility that Dr. Carson might have a point, but rather flatly asserts: “This statement implies that blacks have been manipulated but not whites because they don’t have the same intellectual capacity to resist.”

No, sir, it does not imply that. African-Americans, who for a century after the Civil War voted in large measure for Republican candidates, now vote almost en bloc for Democrats. Whatever the reasons for the switch in parties, it’s difficult not to imagine that extraordinary efforts have been employed by Democrats to retain this key demographic group. That’s politics, after all. Dr. Carson made no slight of anyone’s intellect when he made his statement.

There’s no doubting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s political views: He’s a confirmed Democrat and supporter of President Obama. And, those decisions are his right and privilege to make. But in demonstrating an almost vituperative antipathy to any of Dr. Carson’s arguments or views, he establishes himself not as a reasonable political commentator, but as an ungentlemanly elbow-thrower in the scrum of modern political discussion.