IN THIS WEEK’S Newsweek we learn that American Taliban is no longer just a figure of speech. Colin Soloway reports that one of the 86 survivors of the Mazar-i-Sharif prison uprising, a filthy looking jihadist going by the name “Abdul Hamid,” is actually “a white, apparently middle-class American, a convert to Islam” who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and (are you surprised?) Northern California.
A companion piece, a Newsweek “web exclusive”, provides more biographical detail. There we learn that 20-year-old Abdul, raised John Phillip Walker Lindh, is a “sweet, shy kid” who “wanted to study somewhere where [Islam] is practiced in its purest form.” That would be his mother speaking. Now, there’s not much larger significance to this story that I can see, but it does nicely illustrate two enduring motifs in American journalism.
1) This is a big country. A population of 250-plus million makes for lots of oddballs, a surprising number of whom eventually hook up with reporters.
And 2) Where do they find these parents? On the face of it, John Phillip “Abdul Hamid” Walker Lindh, now reportedly in the custody of American Special Forces, looks likely to be tried for treason. And his parents, who one assumes must be distraught beyond measure, nonetheless babble to reporters about what a good boy he is. That, and give evidence that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Here’s Dad, a lawyer by the way: “When the U.S.S. Cole was bombed as it refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden in October of 2000, killing 17 U.S. sailors, father and son had an uncomfortable e-mail exchange. Frank says he was upset that the dead sailors were the same age as his son. John seemed to have a more casual view of the attack, which U.S. authorities blamed on operatives of Osama bin Laden. He suggested that the U.S. ship should never have been there in the first place, and that by docking in an Islamic country, had committed an ‘act of war.’ The bombing, John implied, was a justified response. Lindh says he was ‘concerned’ by his son’s views, but felt that since John was an adult, there was little he could do to change them. ‘It was clear he had developed a different point of view,’ says Lindh. ‘My days of molding him were over.'”
Maybe his days of molding his son were over, but he was still paying his bills. When “Abdul” e-mailed his parents in April that he was going to leave the madrassah in Pakistan and go “somewhere cooler” (Afghanistan), Dad wired $1,200.
Mom, meanwhile, thinks if “he got involved with the Taliban he must have been brainwashed.” But she is proud of him and seems to have been supportive when he dropped out of high school to study the Koran at a San Francisco mosque, and then spent a year in Yemen as a 17-year-old attending the Yemeni Language Institute.
Someone in this family may have been brainwashed, but it doesn’t sound like it was Abdul, the Marin County jihadist.
Postscript: Multiculturalists will be pleased to learn that Abdul Hamid’s parents say he decided to convert after being assigned to read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in high school. It’s always uplifting to be reminded that books can change people’s lives, right? What do you want to bet Alex Haley’s classic isn’t on as many high schools’ required reading lists by next fall as it is now.
Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
BONUS: Be sure to read William Kristol’s op-ed, “Embrace Taiwain,” in the December 4, 2001 Washington Post.
