RIYADH, Saudi Arabia. In this, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, expatriate Christians must practice their religion underground in order to avoid deportation. "I try to keep the flame alive," says Michael Cox, a construction engineer from Lenexa, Kansas, as he listens to "Frosty the Snowman" through headphones in order to escape detection.

Because Saudi Arabia is located in the eastern hemisphere, where water flows counter-clockwise in toilet bowls, Christmas is celebrated on June 25th, six months after its official date in the west. In the weeks leading up to the highest holy day of the Christian religion, the strains of Christmas music that Cox tries to hide become audible as thousands of westerners listen to familiar carols as they go about their business. Many militant groups, al Quaeda among them, say it is time for a crackdown.

"It is well-known that Christmas is a plot by the Zionist merchants, and Christmas music, with the exception of Bing Crosby, is the product of a vast Jewish conspiracy," says one tape attributed to a radical imam that is currently number five with a bullet on the Billboard Easy Listening Chart. "For instance, did you know that 'White Christmas'--the most popular Christmas song of all time--was written by Irving Berlin, an American Jew?"

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i20619

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at July 26, 2007 3:57 PM

Aw, come on!

Not once does this book mention The Prophet Who Must Not Be Named or The Religion Which Must Not be named.

It's just a very interesting book showing the problems of a society in which certain things Must Not Be Named.

Posted by: freedomschool at July 26, 2007 3:58 PM

...and some of these people are building nuclear weapons...

Posted by: livefreeordie! at July 26, 2007 4:05 PM

Re: Harry Potter, Zionist agent

Yeah.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8396697765857477923&q=tom+and+jerry%2C+zionist&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Posted by: Frank at July 26, 2007 4:15 PM

They're onto you Ms Rowling. Your plot to convince muslim children that people can rejoice in their differences, fight evil and not blow themselves up and still be happy, has been discovered by the ayatollahs.

Probably be a fartwa issued for your death in the interest of peace and tolerance.

/sarc

What a bunch of losers.

Posted by: walterc at July 26, 2007 4:15 PM

This is off subject, but PRNewswire is reporting the burning of a $60,000 koran by a gay activist artist somewhere deep within the bowels of Chicago... http://www.prnewswire.com/publicinterest/ ...
Does this mean "Rage Boy" will be showing up again?
dt

Posted by: rubicon220 at July 26, 2007 4:16 PM

"The paper said that "Harry Potter" was a Zionist project in which billions of dollars had been invested in order to disrupt the minds of young people"

...I hope they do not discover MAD magazine...

Posted by: exsgtbrown at July 26, 2007 4:19 PM

In an article, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is identified with Iranian Supreme Leader 'Ali Khamenei, criticized Iran's Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry for approving the distribution of the new book in the "Harry Potter" series.
The paper said that "Harry Potter" was a Zionist project in which billions of dollars had been invested in order to disrupt the minds of young people.

Source: Kayhan, Iran, July 26, 2007

And my favorite quote from the last Harry Potter book is -- "They are nuttier than squirel poo". I think that adequately describes old ali khamenei....

Posted by: CelticCoyote at July 26, 2007 4:20 PM

This is off subject, but PRNewswire is reporting the burning of a $60,000 koran by a gay activist artist somewhere deep within the bowels of Chicago...

Are you saying someone thinks a koran is work $60,000? Or is that a typo and it should say $6.00?

Posted by: walterc at July 26, 2007 4:22 PM

This is off subject, but PRNewswire is reporting the burning of a $60,000 koran by a gay activist artist somewhere deep within the bowels of Chicago...

Are you saying someone thinks a koran is worth $60,000? Or is that a typo and it should say $6.00?

Posted by: walterc at July 26, 2007 4:23 PM

CelticCoyote - great one!

rubicon - I can hardly wait for rage boy - an amusement all in one package. Watch all the violence and outrage that one provokes while death and torture just carry on as usual.

Posted by: R_not at July 26, 2007 4:26 PM

That's funny. He doesn't look...

Oh, what's the use? I simply cannot top the original article.

Posted by: AnneCrockett at July 26, 2007 4:27 PM

Are they looking for this Ali From New Jersey who inspired this british jehadis?

Students who descended into extremism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6916654.stm
Five young British Muslim men have been jailed for downloaded and sharing masses of extremist material. During their trial they argued that they were not terrorists but intellectually curious. But what evidence convinced the jury they had gone too far?

When Mohammed Irfan Raja quietly walked out of his family home in Ilford, east London, on 24 February 2006, he had dreams of becoming known for something more than the 18-year-old schoolboy he then was.

But today, as the 19-year-old and four men from Bradford University begin jail sentences, his name becomes just another associated with the jihadi extremism of radicalised young British Muslim men.

In one of the first trials of its kind Raja, Awaab Iqbal, 20, Aitzaz Zafar, 20, Usman Malik, 21, and Akbar Butt, 20 have been jailed for downloading and sharing extremist terrorism-related material.

Raja and his co-accused had watched videos of men blowing themselves up in Iraq and elsewhere - films where the suicide bomber often appears ecstatic in his final moments, edited to rousing music before being posted online.

They had dipped into the classic jihadi texts passed around on the internet, including an infamous call to arms urging men to "Join the Caravan" and become mujihadeen warriors for Afghanistan.

And Raja's intention, according to the prosecution, was clear in the letter he left his parents.

Clockwise from top left: Aitzaz Zafar, Akbar Mohammed Butt, Usman Malik and Awaab Iqbal
Clockwise from top left: Aitzaz Zafar, Akbar Mohammed Butt, Usman Malik and Awaab Iqbal
"If not in this [world] we will meet in the [highest reaches of heaven]," he wrote in English and Arabic. "When death befalls you maybe then you will appreciate why I have gone now. At such news there are parents in the world that would phone their families and friends and rejoice at the decision of their son.

And below a dotted line he added: "PS just in case you think I am going to do something in this country, you can rest easy that I am not - the conventional method of warfare is safer.

"PPS if you want to keep my letter then cut from the dotted line, as these people (of UK) use everything against you."

These people included his parents. Decent hardworking people, they called the police, fearing their son had been brainwashed by terrorists.

Raja, meanwhile, was already hundreds of miles away. His personal journey on the road of radicalisation had brought him into contact with the four students via a like-minded American "brother" called Ali, whom they all knew via the net.

Political change

When Raja decided he wanted to move beyond being sympathetic to jihadism,"Brother" Ali in New Jersey had pointed him in the direction of the Bradford four. They were planning to go to Pakistan to train to fight in Afghanistan, he was to learn.

MARTYDOM SONG
Dear mother I need your prayer, tie a coffin on my head
Track in Urdu recovered from Irfan Raja's computer

Raja arrived in Bradford carrying three CDs entitled "Philosophy" full of extremist material. But in the words of his counsel James Sturman QC quickly changed his mind. "He crossed the Rubicon but having set foot on the other bank, he turned back immediately - his guilt was very short-lived," he told the court.

Back home questions were being asked about how Irfan Raja had got involved in this ideology. Irfan, the court heard, had been depressed and lonely.

The family were not the source of the ideology: Irfan's grandfather had proudly served in the British India police force. His medal, pinned personally on his chest by Lord Mountbatten in 1944, is a family heirloom.

On returning home, Raja, supported by his family, decided to tell the police everything. In one interview he spoke openly and frankly about why he thought it was right to go and fight for Muslim causes abroad.

Online radicalisation

After police arrested the others, their probing of computers revealed mountains of extremist material - chatroom transcripts, jihadi songs and rhetorical texts.

Aitzaz Zafar
Police found a computer montage of Zafar and the 9/11 hijackers
The five had all spent hours online in their respective bedrooms, or at college, talking to other radicalised youngsters in areas of the internet completely unbeknown to their parents.

While none of the men had plans to be bombers in the UK, some of them had downloaded technical information on bombs and portions of what the police described as an Al Qaeda training manual. The four students did however have plans to go to Pakistan.

Their key contact was another British man called Imran. In one online chat, Imran explained how they could come to his home in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province unnoticed. He also advised them on how to shake off any surveillance.

"Have a cover story," he tells them. "Get a wedding card made up, and photos of your cousins."

These men had entered a closed environment in which to be a member of this elite circle of believers in the cause was enough to convince yourself that your choices were right.

The prosecution said the men were sufficiently far down the road to be a real danger.

Posted by: aggiegabe at July 26, 2007 4:30 PM

I won't post any spoilers but there's also a very interesting scene set in Kings Cross Station in the book.

I can't say that Ms. Rowling had radical Islam in mind when she wrote her books but that's certainly what kept coming into my mind as I read this last one.

Posted by: Josephine at July 26, 2007 4:37 PM

aggiegab, wow - good post. I think back to those years of my life and even when I got depressed I didn't want to go out to kill people, I went hiking or bicycling instead - 'communed' with nature. Whatever happened to going out and having some fun?! Partying, meeting the opposite sex, and experiencing new and wild things?! I think that when a base belief system offers nothing except that death is ok and better if you take infidels down with you - then there is something wrong there.

What a drag on humanity islam has proven to be. It is like a 'heavy cloak' that one can never remove even if it is 120 degrees outside - sort of like the tents the women wear in some places - but it is on the psyche.

Posted by: R_not at July 26, 2007 4:39 PM

i didn't know that "jewry" had even crept into sorcery and magic? i must burn all my copies whilst raising my arm "dr. strangelove style" over the burning ashes.

seriously though, Josephine is this true? she had radical islam in mind? i have never read any of the books nor seen the films btw.

Posted by: leonthepigfarmer at July 26, 2007 4:41 PM

'...the burning of a $60,000 koran by a gay activist artist somewhere deep within the bowels of Chicago...'

I dunno who Chicago is but they say everyone has a book inside them. As for a $60K koran! What's this a first edition signed copy by Beelzebub himself? Just stick with the Potter. It's just as believable but the Zionists will pocket the royalties.

Posted by: western infidel at July 26, 2007 4:51 PM

Because Saudi Arabia is located in the eastern hemisphere, where water flows counter-clockwise in toilet bowls, Christmas is celebrated on June 25th, six months after its official date in the west. from the article

Perhaps I missed this in geography or physics class, but I thought hemispheres were north and south, with the equater dividing the two. I was also under the impression that you had to go south of the equater to see a toilet draining counter clockwise. But then again, I missed a lot in school.

Posted by: TexasInfidel at July 26, 2007 5:01 PM

Robert-

Intriguing... "potterwatch".

So, "Potter" stands, in a magical inversion, for "jihad"?

Ergo:

Harry Anti-Jihad?

Well, any Martel in a storm.

(But methinks the Mohammedans play dirty quidditch, and mayhaps use a "doctored" Quaffle. I have 10 nieces and nephews and have caught Hogwarts by osmosis. Rowlings is okay if she distracts even one Muslim kid from the Koran.)

Posted by: profitsbeard at July 26, 2007 5:17 PM

"seriously though, Josephine is this true? she had radical islam in mind?"
Posted by: leonthepigfarmer

leon -- No, I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I have no idea if radical Islam has ever crossed the author's mind. I just meant to say that it crossed my own mind as I read the book.

The Harry Potter books are basically about good people fighting against evil, just as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We all know that's Tolkien's books were influenced by his experiences during the war. I don't know what Rowling thinks but I think the war against radical Islam is the war for our time and that's why Harry Potter's fight against "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" (the evil Lord Voldemort) reminded me of the fight against the-religion-that-must-not-be-named.

I don't remember when the first Harry Potter book was published and I don't know when Ms. Rowling started writing the series or what influenced her.

Posted by: Josephine at July 26, 2007 5:18 PM

I can't help but think of Islam when I read the Lord of the Rings or watch the films.

Aragorn exhorts the "men of the West" to fight the evil that comes from the East...

Posted by: atheling at July 26, 2007 5:32 PM

Josephine-

The first Potter book was published in June, 1997, under the British title "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".

(Thinking American kids might dislike the word Philosophy and prefer the more magical-sounding Sorcery, they morphed the title in the U.S. to "Sorcerer's Stone".)

Any modern fictional clash between primal decency and evil will always lend itself to being read as one between the civilized and the barbaric, especially the conflict now playing out by beheadings and bombings of civilians going on daily.

Posted by: profitsbeard at July 26, 2007 6:43 PM

exsgtbrown, I hope they don't discover Mad magazine. lol Now that mag was humor!

Posted by: AMartinez at July 26, 2007 6:51 PM

Admittedly the Jews are an industrious and energetic lot. And there is plenty of talent among them. But really ...

They don't actually do everything.

I think that J. K. Rowling is most likely C of E.

:-)

Posted by: joeblough at July 26, 2007 7:13 PM

Posted by: Josephine:
I don't remember when the first Harry Potter book was published and I don't know when Ms. Rowling started writing the series or what influenced her.

Profitsbeard covered the year the first book was published, so I'll just add that JK Rowling starting writing about Harry Potter in 1990. She claims that the idea of a boy wizard came to her while she was stuck on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London.

She finished the manuscript to the first book in 1995, and lived happily ever after...

Posted by: Matamoros at July 26, 2007 7:27 PM

Speaking of Jews, has Spenser Katz weighed in on this subject?

Posted by: joeblough at July 26, 2007 7:28 PM

The thing I find most interesting is the assumption here by the Iranian Imperial Wizard that any work of skill and imagination must be bought by billions. I think that's a sort of Islamic mirror-image fallacy in that they are projecting their own practise of spending the oil money for such sophisticated items as advanced weapon systems and nuclear reactors, items they are forced to buy from the West. These guys really are Geico's Neanderthals.

Posted by: jewdog at July 26, 2007 7:39 PM

profitsbeard & Matamoros -- Thanks.

Posted by: Josephine at July 26, 2007 7:45 PM

Are US and British English that different that pg 437 on the US version is pg 355 on the British/Canadian version? Why does the US edition need some 82 extra pages?

Wonder which version the Aussies and Kiwis read?

Posted by: Infidel Pride at July 26, 2007 7:50 PM

Hmmm...so Christmas, what we christians celebrate as the birthday of Jesus Christ, is a zionist conspiracy??? (implying it's fraud and not part of the God of Abraham, thus unacceptable)

Hmmmm...does this charlatan realize that he just put irrevocable distance between his propaganda pap, and clearly and unmistakably stating that HIS god and the God of Amraham are two different Gods?

Thanks mullah-bullahshit...you just severed any legitimacy you had left with the remainder of the west, save that of your collaborators who still kiss-up to you and facts-be-damned.

As per mullahs BS, islam is now officially not based on the same God of Abraham as that of the west, thus illegitimate and, (everybody now) A CULT OF DEATH.

Thanks you for proving all our suspicions beyond doubt now, ali...we will never make the mistake of affiliating you and your CULT OF DEATH with real religion ever again.
You've truly clarified that for all of us.
Thank you for proving us all RIGHT.

Don't ya just love it when the other side does your work for ya? LOL

Posted by: jcom972 at July 26, 2007 8:00 PM

It's those bloody JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZ

Posted by: ewha1 at July 26, 2007 8:04 PM

Aha! I KNEW that Harry Potter was a sneaky Zionist son of a bitch!

...seriously, don't the Iranians have anything better to do with their time?

Posted by: GetBornAgain at July 26, 2007 8:09 PM

Yes...they DO...
problem is...that requires Playboy magazines, whiskey and blowup dolls, which they sadly lack...

Oh yeah...forgot, that's another eeeeevil zionist plot by the jooooooooooooooozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Posted by: jcom972 at July 26, 2007 8:28 PM

If you rearrange the letters in the name "Harry Potter" you get "Mossad Agent".

(At least if you live in Iran.)

You really can get: "Y R The Rat ROP".

(Which makes me think Rowlings was ahead of her time.)

Posted by: profitsbeard at July 26, 2007 8:52 PM

Profitsbeard - I think you've nailed it, in your second comment.

Very perceptive comments, too, from josephine, freedomschool and waiterc.

freedomschool - yes: "It's just a very interesting book showing the problems of a society in which certain things Must Not Be Named". And that particular shoe fits a LOT of feet. I've always thought Book Five, with its devastating portrait of that quintessential apparatchik Dolores Umbridge, must have gone down a treat in Vietnam, Cuba, China and Russia, not with the kids but with their parents.

Waiterc - good point. "Your [Rowlings'] plot to convince muslim children that people can rejoice in their differences, fight evil and not blow themselves up and still be happy, has been discovered by the ayatollahs [sarc off]."

Well, as far as the idiot ayatollahs are concerned, the whole of Western civilisation is a Zionist plot (ever since the writing of the four gospels in Greek? – or perhaps since the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in Alexandria, long before Christ?)…so, given that Rowlings has re-stated, eloquently, consistently and splendidly, a whole mass of the central principles and images of what one might call 'Christendom', what else can they think? The seventh book has two epigraphs. The first is from a pagan Greek tragedy, Aeschylus' "The Libation Bearers". The second is a passage on friendship and eternity, from a book by a Quaker Christian, William Penn's "More Fruits of Solitude". There you have it: Athens and Jerusalem side by side.

But: it's too late! The ayatollahs didn't figure it out till the seventh book! Think of those millions of Muslim children who have read books one through six! All those little seeds have dropped down into the subconscious, those beautiful, persuasive images of love, hope, laughter, fidelity, truth and troth; courage, joy, hard work, equal and creative partnership between men and women, monogamous marriage (the Weasleys). And maybe, just maybe, some of those golden seeds may blossom into life.

(Of course, one doesn’t know how much the translations have been…bowdlerised?; but I'm sure many children of the Muslim upper classes, at least, in many countries, know enough English to be able to attempt the English originals or - if Lebanese, or Persian - are reading the books in French). Imagine what a Muslim girl, whether in Britain or Saudi Arabia, thinks and feels as she enters a world in which Hermione rebukes and advises her male friends - and is taken seriously?

I'm sure that when Rowlings started she didn't have The Religion That Mustn't Be Named in mind at all - after all, she'd been working on the first book for some years before it was published in 1997, and the main elements in the entire story arc - books 1-6 - were all worked out from the beginning. If anything, personal grief - the death of her mother at 45, from multiple sclerosis - seems to have been one of the main 'triggers'.

Rowlings' political scenario seems to draw mainly on the rise of Nazism. But then: there are lots of affinities between Nazism and Islam. The fact that Voldemort kills out of hand anyone who tries to leave his service is ...interesting, shall we say?

I've sometimes thought that the Muggle/Magical division in Rowlings' world flows from the habit of mind that we have in the West, the 'separation of church and state', the distinction between Religion and Politics. The two realms interpenetrate each other yet are clearly distinguished: the Magicals have submitted to a Separation of Powers.

And this is where it gets interesting: the war in Rowlings' world takes place between two parties of Magicals. Perhaps: as Christians and Jews, say, to Muslims, so the Order of the Phoenix to the Death Eaters. The 'Dumbledore' party, among the Magicals, have chosen (since 1689, interestingly) NOT to interfere with, or exercise abusive power over, Muggles (thus parallelling the separation of church and state, the spiritual and the temporal, in Western civilisation) - see the first chapter of book six. The separationists limit their own use of power even among themselves, subordinating it to ethics - and their basic moral code is the same as that of any moral Muggle. The Dark Wizards, above all the Voldemort party, accept no such division of spheres, no such self-limitation, with regard either to Muggles or to other Magicals. They believe that Magic must rule, absolutely: there can only be tyrants and slaves.

The mullahs may not be able to articulate WHY they find Rowlings’ books disturbing. But all her core assumptions - especially, perhaps, this image of a society governed by the Separation of Powers, along with the ethics, the principles of reciprocity and of the Golden Rule - flatly contradict, at every level, the way in which Islam imagines the world. Within Rowlings' world, it is in the faces of the Death Eaters and Voldemort, all eaten up with spiritual pride and the ugly desire to hurt and control and kill those whom they regard as impure or inferior , that the faces of the ayatollahs appear as in a mirror.

Rowlings - like every traditional Western writer, ever since Christianity [itself anchored in Judaism] turned the world upside down - gives short shrift to spiritual pride, lies, the lust for power, greed, selfishness, cruelty. She delights in humility, compassion, wisdom, grace, forgiveness, mercy, truth; and she revels in plain honest passion, eros, and uproarious, vulgar laughter, especially laughter that punctures all pretentious pride. So her worldview collides with Islam - how could it not?

Being a poet, steeped in medieval and renaissance lit (her books are full of heraldic images - the White Stag, the Unicorn, the Hippogriff, the Griffin, the Phoenix, to name a few) Rowlings could not but have sensed, at some level, what's been happening in the world. That we do have 'death eaters' in our midst, ready to wreak random terror and murder upon those they believe impure or inferior, in order to achieve absolute power. Her response to that has been a sustained act of affirmation of all that is good in our civilisation, in our history.

As she's been writing her way along, and as the moviemakers have galloped at her heels, events have - so to speak - caught up with them. Real events, like the various terror bombings in New York or Madrid or London, have added a whole extra layer of meaning to images and analogies in the novels.

(As for Tolkien: he was a medievalist, and a Catholic, and I am convinced that his epic consciously draws on, or is inspired by, some of the episodes in the West's 1300-year defence against the Jihad. I think that 1300-year-war has far more to do with Tolkien than do either of the two World Wars or the Cold War. There is at least one major episode in his story, the ride of the Rohirrim to break the siege of Gondor, that has clear parallels with Jan Sobieski's ride to relieve Vienna in 1683. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if Tolkien, like Chesterton, Churchill, and Belloc, felt Islam on the horizon as a dark shadow rising; though maybe, unlike them, he never articulated that warning. Instead he drew on the deep history and transformed it into a myth with contemporary resonance.)

End of essay! Sorry to go on at such length, but it's something I've thought about quite a bit over the past couple of years.

I guess you all can now see why I chose my particular internet 'handle'.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at July 26, 2007 9:15 PM

those immans would fine any books that muslims kids read that is not the koran to be something made up by the Joooos.. they , iranians mullahd or what the hell immans have no imagination but their bloody koran.

Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at July 26, 2007 9:21 PM

A mad mullah wielding a sharp fatwa is a sight to behold...Or, there's no biz like show biz...

Careful Harry, there's a mullah with a fatwa over there, he's telling you, you better beware.
One more slip up with those Zionist plotters, and there wont be anymore Harry Potters.

Posted by: duh_swami at July 26, 2007 9:24 PM

We've got the British-Canadian version: the 'potterwatch' reference is on page 355. And yes: I too stopped in my tracks when I got to that bit and thought - what???

I think the page number difference might be accounted for by differences in print size/ page size.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at July 26, 2007 9:28 PM

The page discrepency is simple. We Americans like our books Super Sized.

Posted by: AnneCrockett at July 26, 2007 9:47 PM

Hmm. If it weren't for the super-sizing, the US book might be ever so slightly shorter from the cumulative effect of fewer "ou" spellings of words-- favorite, humor, etc.

Posted by: MarisolJW at July 26, 2007 10:04 PM

"I guess you all can now see why I chose my particular internet 'handle'."
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy

dumbledoresarmy -- Yes, I can see that you've put a great deal of thought into this and you express it all very well. Thank you.

Posted by: Josephine at July 26, 2007 10:43 PM

Harry Potter, like Coca-Cola, represents a cultural invasion. If they were just honest about this, their jihad would get more credence from the rest of us.

Posted by: Conservationist at July 26, 2007 11:14 PM

dumbledoresarmy:

Points well taken.

Posted by: atheling at July 26, 2007 11:29 PM

"These people included his parents. Decent hardworking people, they called the police, fearing their son had been brainwashed by terrorists". Quite right aggiegabe, so they did. Not all Muslims in the UK have been radicalised - some still know where their loyalties ought to lie and some, perhaps many, are intent on forging a type of British Islam that owes little to the Wahabbis and a lot to their own experiences of life both in the UK and in the countries that many of them had to flee from.

Posted by: Jonathan Ralbrooke at July 26, 2007 11:31 PM

dumbledoresarmy-

I hope Rowlings reads you overview.

Nicely put.

As Blake said:

"If a thing loves, it is infinite."

Posted by: profitsbeard at July 26, 2007 11:33 PM

"These people included his parents. Decent hardworking people, they called the police, fearing their son had been brainwashed by terrorists". Quite right aggiegabe, so they did. Not all Muslims in the UK have been radicalised"

There are many Muslims who have been living in western countries for a long time and are quite "westernized". They attended western schools and universities before the plagues of multiculturalism and political correctness corrupted education. The self loathing (i.e. Western Civilization) rhetoric and curriculum that comes from mainly leftist academics like Ward Churchill has taught students nothing but contempt for our society and our heritage.

We are culturally weakened and vulnerable. Look at Europe.

That's how jihadists are emboldened.

That's how they will win if we don't educate people on why the West is worth fighting for.

Posted by: atheling at July 26, 2007 11:55 PM

This just keeps getting better by the minute. Maybe I should give HP a try after all...

Posted by: Fanusi Khiyal at July 27, 2007 3:06 AM

Excellent post, dumbledorsarmy!

BTW, are we quite sure that J.K. Rowling hasn't heard of this site? :-)))

Posted by: Proud_Islamophobe at July 27, 2007 6:17 AM

dumbledoresarmy -

Excellent post, thank you.

I have read all the Potter books and am now rereading books 1 through 6 in preparation for the final volume. For several years now, I have thought that Rowling's books have much deeper meanings than may be apparent on the surface. The books grow progressively deeper and darker, and the evil beings in them have the characteristics of islamisists. Aspects of Voldemort's personality could easily have been modelled after Mohammed. Whether this was in any way intentional on Rowling's part is unlikely, but the premise behind the series is the everlasting struggle between good and evil. Her writing does celebrate all the virtues discussed above and in addition, she celebrates England.

These are not just children's books.

Posted by: ImNoDhimmi at July 27, 2007 7:07 AM

Glad to see I am not the only one to read Harry Potter this way.

Posted by: FreeSpeech at July 27, 2007 8:24 AM

I would surely call the Prophet as Voldemort and the Muslims as Death Eaters.

Posted by: proud-hindu at July 27, 2007 9:34 AM

We've got to send in snipers to take out those damn squirrels they captured not long ago, they have spilled the beans...

Posted by: eloivsdiablo at July 27, 2007 10:16 AM

@dumbledoresarmy

Thank you for very much for that excellent and informative post!

Posted by: Ynkedoodl2 at July 27, 2007 11:08 AM

As I read the HP books, I have made this connection many times. This minister's refusal to admit that You-know-who has returned, the media ripping members of the Order apart to discredit them, etc. I think the final book is the most obvious. On page 6 of the American edition, Voldemort uses words like 'convert' and 'subjugate'. These are both goals of jihadists. I think the first books of the series were children's books, they were pre 9/11, but she used the latest installments to voice her own political opinions. This is just my interpretation.

Posted by: liander1 at July 27, 2007 11:43 AM

There is another point. Hogwarts, though very like a British "public school" (i.e. private school, of course) in most ways, is in fact a public institution, where all children of magical heritage in Britain are educated (unless their parents object - there is no State compulsion here). Rowling, who is a former schoolteacher herself, gives a very convincing account of a British school's ethnic mix, with an English majority and a number of Scots, but a large number of minority students - an Irishman (Seamus Finnigan), a Jew (Anthony Goldstein), two West Indian blacks (Lee Jrdan and Angelina Johnson), two Hindus (the Patil twins), and a Chinese girl (Cho Chang). Notice any ethnic-religious group missing? Which ethnic minority, of which Britain gets to hear rather a lot, is not at all visible at Hogwarts?

My guess is that as soon as she started setting out her little Utopia of enlightened wizards and courageous young men, Rowling realized, consciously or unconsciously, that there was no way to treat the Muslim group in the same light as all the others. All these young men and women are loyal to the values of Hogwarts, whatever their different origin; in fact, every single one of them belongs to the three loyal Houses, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. If Mrs.Rowling had placed only one Muslim in the story and made him/her (as is perfectly possible, individually) a loyal and decent British citizen, she would have created a visibly unlikely picture. She would then have had to produce another, a violent rebel, just in order to show the opposite side, and perhaps place him/her in Slytherin. At which point her picture would start being overbalanced and taken over by the internal issues of the British Muslim community, which would have dragged the narrative down. It would also introduce in a wholly realistic way issues such as terrorism and political violence, with which she wished to deal in a more abstract and fantastic manner. So she just decided to have no Muslim characters at all. They only appear, briefly and from a distance, in Book IV, and they are played for laughs. I do not think this makes Mrs.Rowling an opponent of Islam (although she may well be), but it shows the intractability of the Muslim problem as well as the natural similarity of Islamist terrorism and what Mrs.Rowling sees as pure evil.

Posted by: Paolo at July 28, 2007 4:48 AM