Pistons' Van Gundy latest to voice strong opposition to travel ban
Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy was the latest NBA voice to condemn President Donald Trump's travel ban against seven predominantly Muslim countries Monday, comparing it to the seeds of the some of the lowest moments in human history.
"It's really starting to get really scary stuff," Van Gundy said, according to CSN New England's A. Sherrod Blakely. "We're getting back to the days of putting Japanese in relocation camps and Hitler registering the Jews. That's where we're headed."
During last year's election campaign, Trump did not explicitly rule out a database for Muslim U.S. citizens, creating a controversy that some felt echoed Nazi registration of Jewish people in the 1930s, or the government internment of Japanese-American and -Canadian citizens during the Second World War.
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On Sunday, another NBA critic of Trump, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, said that the administration could end up breeding further hatred of U.S. policy with the ban.
"I would just say that as someone whose family member was a victim of terrorism, having lost my father, if we're trying to combat terrorism by banishing people from coming to this country, by ... really going against the principles of what our country is about and creating fear, it's the wrong way to go about it," Kerr said.
Kerr's father, Malcolm, was an American professor at a Lebanese university when he was shot dead by suspected extremists in 1984.
Van Gundy is no stranger to criticizing Trump either, previously calling him "brazenly racist and misogynistic."
"It's just fear-mongering and playing to a certain base of people that have some built-in prejudices that just aren't fair," Van Gundy said.