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.
