"The Haliban" and the Hollow Humor of Internet Virality

The popular stats website Basketball Reference has a feature highlighting the nicknames of NBA players. Some of these are obvious like “His Airness” for Michael Jordan or “The Answer” for Allen Iverson. Others are a little more obscure like “Argentina’s Flying Man” for Manu Ginobili and “Phatman” for Anthony Davis.

Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton has a few nicknames on his Basketball Reference page that have been used in social media discourse throughout his career. The names listed are “Hali”, “The Moment”, and “HIMaburton”. But recently, a new nickname has emerged through social media: The Haliban.

The name is of course a play on the Taliban, the Islamist militant organization that ruled over Afghanistan in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was a primary reason that the United States went to war with Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The nickname is indicative of a growing trend where a younger generation of fans feel empowered to make light of a moment that ushered in an era of racism, diminishing history, and reopening wounds for many that lived through the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The Common Thread of New York City

I have seen two primary instances of fans online invoking language to equate terrorism with NBA players. Both happened to include the New York Knicks. The first was in 2023 when the Knicks played the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs. Cavs fans on X (formerly Twitter) took screenshots of the score being 9-11 and posted images of the Twin Towers in ruins as a way of insulting New Yorkers and Knicks fans.

The second instance was during this year’s playoff run that saw the Knicks matched up against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals. After the Pacers stormed back from a 20-point deficit to win the game in overtime, fans once again took to social media to make 9/11 and terrorist jokes. One fan likened the loss to 9/11 while another said “The Haliban just bombed New York City”. Others even crudely put Tyrese Haliburton on an image of a pilot crashing into the Twin Towers.

Despite eliminating the Knicks, and thus the city tie-in to the events of September 11, 2001, the terrorist adjacent posts in the name of virality have persisted. With the Pacers now playing the Oklahoma City Thunder, there has been a mixing of tragedies where memes have been created stating “The Haliban to Oklahoma City” with an image of the Oklahoma City Federal Building after it was bombed by Timothy McVay in 1995.

Like most things on the internet these days, these posts are meant to ignite a reaction and promote engagement. And while the attacks of September 11^th, 2001, are coming up on being a quarter of a century ago, the wounds are still fresh for many people.

The Reminder of When the World Changed

As an Arab American that lived in New York City during the September 11^th attacks, I may never be comfortable with it being used as a joke for a few likes on social media. For me, that was the day that everything changed. I was 14 years old, and I immediately went from a citizen of New York City to the enemy.

In the years that followed, America went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq in the pursuit of “liberation” and exacting vengeance on those that attacked the country. Those wars resulted in the deaths over seven thousand US soldiers and over 400,000 civilians across Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Beyond those startling numbers, it is reported that roughly 300,000 of the military personnel deployed in these wars have returned home with varying degrees of post-traumatic stress disorder. For Arabs living in the United States, this has led to more surveillance and the assumption of hatred towards America.

Everyone’s story of post-9/11 racism is different. For me, it has meant being denied job opportunities, being placed on watchlists, and having to defend my ancestry in social situations. I have been called into further questioning at airports multiple times into a room filled with other Arabs and Black people with Muslim names. I have also been asked if I was a terrorist without any indication of behavior that would prompt such a question.

The attacks on September 11^th created a different reality for me. It meant seeing my name prompted a double take, it led to relocation to the Middle East to finish high school, and it meant merciless harassment by Americans that were angry that their country was attacked.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Islamic school that my sister and I attended had police officers guarding the entrances because the people of New York needed a villain. And that manifested in pulling hijabs from girls' heads, throwing things at school buses, and threats to poison lunch food. That day was an inflection point where diversity went from being celebrated to condemned.

As a result, I don’t think I will ever be okay with a player being assigned a nickname that is affiliated with terrorism or the events of that day. Doing so, in my view, diminishes its historical and emotional significance and disrespects the countless people whose lives were impacted forever because of it. Perhaps it is an age thing, where a younger generation that was born after September 11^th doesn’t understand the magnitude of all that transpired then.

However, I would caution that the negligence of history in that manner is why we are often so doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. The positive side of this situation is that most of NBA media and Tyrese Haliburton himself haven’t given the new nickname any oxygen (which explains why it is not a nickname listed on Haliburton’s Basketball Reference page).

Despite that, it seems that nothing will ever be off-limits in this age of unquenched social media virality thirst. I would simply advise that anyone looking to make these posts or engage in them to think about who will see them and what the cost of chasing likes and cheap laughs truly is.