Can JK Rowling Become the Game-Changer in the Clash of Civilizations?

Can JK Rowling Become the Game-Changer in the Clash of Civilizations?

Coming back from Yom Kippur Thursday night, I found out that a Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, UK, was targeted in a car ramming and stabbing attack. Two men attending services on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar perished—one murdered by the terrorist driver, another fell victim to a bobby’s bullet. Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, weren’t the sole casualties—three other men were seriously wounded, including one from a gunshot.

That wasn’t all. It turned out that the perpetrator, Jihad Al-Shamie, was out on bail for rape charges. And that Jihad’s father, Faraj al-Shamie, is an NHS surgeon. Two years ago, in violation of basic medical ethics, doctor Faraj abu Jihad praised the Simchat Torah Massacre in southern Israel in a social media post—and kept his job.

While this came to light, LBC reported that “a bit violent” antizionist mob gathered outside the Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s residence, threatening him and his family. A few days earlier, Starmer distinguished himself as one of the NATO leaders who recognized a Palestinian state at the United Nations.

None of it is surprising—the UK has been on a downward spiral for decades. Heaton Park was not the largest terrorist attack on British shores or the first deadly incident targeting Jews. Pakistani grooming gangs and rape coverups by the authorities have been ongoing, too—just as the menacing demonstrations of the home-grown Arab Street have.

Yet an interesting thing happened when a frustrated British Jewish woman, Laura Marcus, unleashed her frustration on Twitter/X:

I wonder how most Brits feel when they hear Jews say they no longer feel safe in the UK?

The post went viral and caught the eye of JK Rowling, who responded:

I don’t know what most Brits feel, but I’m appalled and ashamed.

The sentiment she expressed gave me hope because, more than anyone else, the beloved youth writer has the potential to be a game-changer in the struggle to defend Western civilization.

It’s not just that she has name recognition like no one else. Rowling’s fantasy-adventure Harry Potter, translated into 85 languages, including exotic languages like Basque and Latin, became the most consequential book of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It redefined Britishness and became the banner of the Millennial generation. Few cultural figures in the UK rival her authority—and when they arguably do, they wisely keep their mouths shut, not in the least because they can’t match the wit and elegance of Rowling’s reasoning.

She, too, could have kept quiet, but she chose to speak out against trans tyranny—and won. She spoke, and the world listened. In the process, she withstood death threats, cancellation attempts, and broken friendships, including those of the former child stars her storytelling made famous, most notably Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the Warner Bros. adaptation.

Not only did the author resist pressure, but it turned out that her woke readers loved her work so much that they couldn’t bring themselves to boycott it. Haters got so desperate that in 2023, one trans-identified Canadian stripped her name off the book and resold it to like-minded individuals.

Rowling is a liberal—a feminist and a multiculturalist. She stood up for women’s rights when establishment feminists added pronouns to their bios. When in April this year the UK Supreme Court ruled that women are women, the dreaded TERF posted a picture of herself smoking a cigar.

Rowling’s books embodied multiculturalism when it was the reigning ideology, but unlike many other liberals, the writer never transitioned woke. Multiculturalism is the idea that all ways of life are interesting and have something to contribute, hence we need to tolerate each other. Harry Potter is filled with assorted folkloric traditions and its author has been known to reveal that a character she wrote was gay, Jewish—or whatever else. Woke, on the other hand, is not so much fascinated with diversity of human tradition as it aggressively uses institutions, including the state, to empower preferred minorities—blacks, trans, Muslims and so on. It’s interested not in getting along but dominance.

Rowling’s principled pro-woman stance suggests that she’s not at all woke. Yet in a way, her triumph on that cultural battlefield, however difficult it felt at the time, is expected. The pretense that men can become women and vice versa was never going to last. It’s abominable that we entertained that folly as long as we did and that we ruined many lives in the process, but the denial of basic biological facts was always going to run out of steam.

On the other hand, survival of the West—a far superior civilization by most measures—is far from certain. And antisemitism is called the oldest hatred for a reason.

Rowling is, without a doubt, a consistent liberal and a friend of the Jewish people. When it would have been easier to join the mob or, at the very least, say nothing, she defended Israel against cultural boycotts, spoke out against Jew-hate and made an antizionist a villain of her 2018 novel Lethal White. Surely, she doesn’t plan on going around feeling ashamed of British antisemitism.

And she is a creature of the West who fashioned herself into a quintessential English language writer. Although she can live anywhere in the world, she chose to stay in her native Scotland, a small and relatively isolated part of Europe that became indispensable to modernity.

Rowling has to recognize that we are in the midst of civilizational conflict and that the tolerant multicultural society she celebrates in her works exists only as remnant of its former self? This type of social arrangement is vulnerable because it hinges on the wholehearted agreement of all parties involved.

If it can’t be sustained, something has got to give. As Douglas Murray recently stated:

At every time of national emergency in our nation’s history we gave something up to survive. We did it in the Napoleonic Wars, we did it in the wars of the twentieth century and we will have to now. We give up extending tolerance to people who do not extend it back to us.

I think that’s something with which most liberals can agree.

Rowling’s integrity is legendary, and her political track record is impressive. Will she lead the charge in defense of the West? Because I can’t think of a person better suited to do it.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.