the guz kahn thing was a response to someone being like, wow this guy is in ofmd and supports palestine too, that's so cool. and he was like, i'm not in that anymore actually, not sure why. i do support palestine though. those things aren't related. and then some people decided to be anti-semitic and went aha i knew taika was secretly a zionist. it's just twitter being weird and people putting screenshots together in a way that makes things seem more dramatic.

That's possible. Like I said in the tags to the post I think it probably has more to do with the budget cuts. We know OFMD's budget was cut for s2. Guz Khan is a fairly popular actor as I understand it and so paying him is somewhat expensive and his character is easier to write off than many of the others. That's my working theory.

That said I still don't think people were wrong for asking questions about it when he mentioned that he would never compromise for a job shortly after getting laid off. He said that he's not saying OFMD is that job and I'm personally choosing to take him at face value there but others are not wrong for reading into it. Additionally I've never seen anyone accuse Taika specifically of Zionism over this (or at all personally). I've seen people talk about Con O'Neill's Zionism, though I don't think that's relevant to this particular discussion it's a fair criticism of Con. Somehow I don't think Taika would be making that call. He got laid off at around the same time the show got renewed, which makes me think that David Jenkins and the creative team probably hadn't made any concrete creative decisions at the time the lay off happened. To my mind that means that he was more likely laid off by someone higher up on the chain. I don't know exactly how these things work but that would track with my money based theory and if he was laid off for ideological reasons I think anyone who knows anything would be squinting at HBO max as a company rather than at Taika who has taken a bit of a step back from his role as EP to play Blackbeard and might not even have the power to pull the trigger like that.

I'm willing to believe that there's nothing there and that things were said and data was compiled in a way that make it look a bit sus when it wasn't. I just don't think that raising that suspicion is wrong.

All that said don't be weird about Taika. That's a huge leap in logic and to my knowledge he has a) never said anything about Palestine and b) spoken out against colonialism repeatedly in other contexts so his politics while sometimes inconsistent do not seem to align with the biggest proponents of Zionism so there's literally no reason to think he has anything to do with anything. All the Jews I know personally are anti-zionist. I know that there are Zionist Jews but from the information I'm working with they're in the minority among Jews. Taika Waititi's Jewishness is unrelated to the Guz Khan lay off. I also gonna go out on a limb here and say Taika Waititi is unrelated to the Guz Khan lay off.

I'm gonna leave this tweet here because I think it's relevant