WATCH: Harry Potter on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
As his famed author refuses to boycott Israel, Harry Potter appears in a new viral video outlining Israel's precarious position
“It’s the story of the recent events in Israel told through the story of the Harry Potter movies,” explains Rachel Lester, who made a viral video clip featuring Harry Potter confronting the existential threats faced by the Jewish State.
“My goal is to make the following issues more relatable to an audience who might not know much about the Middle East conflict: (a) Hamas as a terrorist organization, (b) the biased reactions of world leaders and the media, and (c) the danger that the recently-passed Iran deal poses to Israel and the world.”
The video comes days after Harry Potter author JK Rowling — whose “Harry Potter” books sold 400 million copies and were adapted into the second-highest grossing film series of all time — used Albus Dumbledore, a headmaster of Hogwarts wizarding school in the series, to make a moral point about the need for dialogue and cultural engagement with Israel.
“Dumbledore is an academic and he believes that certain channels of communication should always remain open,” Rowling wrote in a post on TwitLonger, a website that supports sharing longer messages on Twitter.
She referred in the post to a moment in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final book in the series, when Dumbledore chooses to meet Severus Snape, a mysterious professor at Hogwarts, on a hilltop at a time when Snape’s loyalties are unclear.
“At the moment when he answers Snape’s call, he cannot know that Snape isn’t going to try and kill him … Yet still, Dumbledore goes to the hilltop,” Rowling wrote.
She pointed out that Dumbledore chose to meet and speak to Snape, simply because it was the right thing to do.
Dumbledore, she concluded, is the “moral heart of the books. He did not consider all weapons equal and he was prepared, always, to go to the hilltop.”
Rowling’s comments were a riposte to the many social media posts criticizing her involvement in the open letter. Many of the critical tweets and Facebook posts used the characters, language and story of the “Harry Potter” series.
JTA contributed to this report
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