Now Harry Potter is Unamerican?

Julia Turner, writing an article called 'When Harry met Osama' in Slate, reveals that some people have read the new Harry Potter book as anti-American. In fact, she says:

But close reading of the book suggests that Rowling's motives are more authorial than political. She's not using Harry to make points about terrorism. She's using terrorism to make points about Harry. Rowling culls the scariest elements of modern life and uses them as a kind of shorthand, a quick way to instill fear.

If you are a Potter-reader (and I'm not, but some of my best friends etc) then you may find the article tells you too much of the story.

So if you don't want to read the whole thing, here's her main argument:

In 1998, when the first Harry Potter book came out, Voldemort was a fantastical villain, a symbol of evil in the abstract. Today, however, as we substitute for our abstract fear of Voldemort the very real fear we've felt in our own immolated cities, the new book resonates in ways that the old ones have not....Let's hope—for Rowling's sake, if not for Harry's—that it is she, and not Osama Bin Laden, who scares our pants off in the final instalment