u/Icarus_Voltaire

I am an agnostic ex-Muslim Indonesian (🇮🇩) citizen in his mid-twenties. Got no Jewish ancestry as far as I can tell.

https://www.idrlabs.com/zionism-attitude/test.php

The Slate article in question: https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/rf-kuang-israeli-taipei-story-gaza-book-booktok.html

>It’s déjà vu all over again for survivors of the YA Twitter wars of the pre-Elon era. Someone with an advance copy of a forthcoming and much-anticipated novel has posted screenshots from the book as evidence that the author is guilty of thought crimes. This has led to denunciations on Instagram; solemn, brow-furrowing considerations of the affair on YouTube; and firebrand declarations on TikTok. Depending on how familiar you are with how these controversies work, however, you may be surprised to learn that the latest target is R.F. Kuang, the author of such bestselling fantasy novels as Babel, Katabasis, and The Poppy Wars—all books centering elementary critiques of colonialism. She is ordinarily a favorite of online crusaders, although this, perhaps, is what has gotten her into trouble.

>Kuang’s Taipei Story won’t be published until September, and it’s a departure for the author, who has written only one other non-fantasy novel, the publishing-world satire Yellowface. Her new novel is the story of a Chinese American college student who takes an intensive summer course in Mandarin at a university in the capital of Taiwan. But at one “problematic” point in the story, Lily, the narrator, who is in a state of considerable emotional distress, impulsively ducks into a concert hall. The performer is a visiting artist, a pianist from Israel, who plays Liszt, converting Lily into a classical music appreciator. The pianist is unnamed, speaks not a single line of dialogue, and has no interaction with Lily or role in the novel’s plot. He appears on exactly two pages of Taipei Story.

>That’s it—the cause of Instagram comments charging Kuang with having “chosen the side of the oppressor” and with “normalizing a genocidal state,” as well as calls for boycotts of all her books. According to Kuang’s critics, the mere mention of any Israeli character that is not immediately qualified with denunciations of the state itself contributes to the subjugation of Palestinians and constitutes “a propaganda tool of the first rank.” Other commenters have exclaimed “My soul is crushed!” and declared Kuang’s sin ineradicable: “Even if she would remove the character from that none existend state, the damage is done. I personally would never buy one of her books ever again.”

>Kuang wisely has not responded to requests that she address this “issue.” No response or apology can ever be sufficient for the breed of conflict entrepreneurs who live for such online pile-ons and the rich vein of clout they are able to mine from them. If anyone should know that, it’s Kuang, whose work has always exhibited a canny grasp of prevailing political fashions as gleaned from close study of social media. Or, as a friend and Kuang skeptic recently put it: “This is what happens when you cultivate a stupid audience that thinks they’re smart and thinks you’re smart and moral because you do ‘Colonialism Bad 101’ lessons through YA prose.”

>Kuang’s characters have always struggled with the tension between their drive to live up to the expectations of others and their suspicion that the meritocracy they’re competing in might not be worth winning. At the same time, her earlier novels seem engineered to win the approval of precisely the types of sanctimonious, exacting readers who are turning on her now, people with limited real-world experience who compete with each other to perform the most perfected version of ideologies they’ve picked up online. Those ideologies aren’t always wrong, of course, but like the meritocracies Kuang questions in her fiction and the rote platitudes Lily learns to recite in her Mandarin classes, they come across as more received than considered. The notion that novelists must portray Israeli characters as nothing but monsters and that forbidding them to mention their nation at all will do anything to help the desperate residents of Gaza exhibits a belief in the magical powers of language that few but the young and the terminally online can sustain.

TLDR: Online anti-Zionists and Emilies got butthurt an Israeli was depicted in an uncritical fashion and/or without a 'Free Palestine' authorial filibuster.

Centrist: Benjamin "Benny" Gantz (בִּנְיָמִין "בֵּנִי" גַּנְץ). Incumbent leader of Blue and White Israel Resilience Party, Alternate Prime Minister from 17 May 2020 – 13 June 2021, and the 20th Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from 2011 to 2015.

Authleft: Ayman Aadil Odeh (Arabic: أيمن عادل عودة, Hebrew: אַיְּימָן עַאדֶל עוֹדֶה). An Arab Israeli lawyer and leader of Hadash–Ta'al as of 2022.

Authcenter: Bezalel Yoel Smotrich (בְּצַלְאֵל יוֹאֵל סְמוֹטְרִיץ׳). Minister of Finance since 2022, and incumbent leader of the Religious Zionist Party.

Authright: Itamar Ben-Gvir (אִיתָמָר בֶּן גְּבִיר). Minister of National Security since 2022, and incumbent leader of Otzma Yehudit ("Jewish Power"); the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party.

Rightcenter: Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (בִּנְיָמִין "בִּיבִּי" נְתַנְיָהוּ). Incumbent Prime Minister since 29 December 2022 and leader of Likud since 20 December 2005.

Libright: Avigdor Lieberman (אביגדור ליברמן). Founder and leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, Minister of Finance between 2021 and 2022, and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and 2009 to 2012.

Libcenter: Yair Lapid (יָאִיר לַפִּיד). Former journalist, incumbent Leader of the Opposition since January 2023, and leader of Yesh Atid since the party's founding in 2012. Also Prime Minister from 1 July 2022 – 29 December 2022.

Libleft: Yair Golan (יָאִיר גּוֹלָן). Incumbent leader of HaDemokratim, reserve major general in the Israel Defense Forces, and Deputy Minister of Economy from 2021–2022.

Leftcenter: Tamar Zandberg (תָּמָר זַנְדְבֵּרְג). Minister of Environmental Protection from 2021 to 2022, Member of Knesset for Meretz from 2013 to 2021, and leader of Meretz between 2018 and 2019. Head of the National Institute for Climate and Environmental Policy at Ben Gurion University as of July 2025.

Feel free to comment your alternate placements and choices. I was really torn on the placements of Lapid, Gantz, and Lieberman.

What are your thoughts and opinions on former CIA officer and whistleblower John Chris Kiriakou?

I ask this because a while back, clips of interviews and speeches with him had been trending (especially on Instagram), especially on his experiences with working with the CIA, the US government as a whole, and that time he was assigned in a joint op with Mossad (I don’t have the clip stored so if anyone can provide a link that’d be great). And especially on his political views, like those expressed on Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik and how he described Kamala Harris and Donald Trump as "an anti-Arab Democrat and an anti-Arab Republican", respectively.

So I was left wondering where do we social democrats/social liberals/democratic socialists/market socialists etc. stand on this man. Because I will confess, I got the feeling that there is a chance Kiriakou might have fallen to the same curse that seemingly every former Navy SEAL with a book and podcast has fallen victim to (if you know what I am talking about, you know) and so I kinda want to know from people who are more familiar with Kiriakou on what kind of man he is and where someone of our political community (for lack of a better term) ought to stand on him.

So, thoughts and opinions on Kiriakou?

NOTE: I am non-American (am Indonesian 🇮🇩), which might not be that relevant but just to preempt any questions as to why I might not be as in-tuned into this as I probably ought to be.