He was found hiding in a basement, all skin and bones, filthy, wounded and famished. It sounds like a classic case of child abuse. However, John Phillip Walker Lindh, aka John Walker, aka Sulayman, aka Abdul Hamid, is 20 years old. This child of an upper-middle class Marin County, Calif., couple was found in Afghanistan among the Taliban solders, fighting a jihad against his country and the Northern Alliance with an AK-47 in his hands.
Maturity comes to each of us at a different age. According to Frank Lindh and his estranged wife, Marilyn Walker, their son is “really not much more than a boy,” “just a sweet, shy kid,” “totally not streetwise.” Then what, exactly, was this “really good boy,” who hadn’t phoned home in six months, doing half way around the world? How did he finance his Eastern vacation? Most college age kids, who are still dependent on their parents, are required to check in from time to time.
Newsweek magazine reported that, in 1997, when Walker was 17 years of age and legally still a child, he quizzed an online correspondent about how to pursue the Islam vision of bliss and confessed, “I have never seen happiness myself.”
Why was life so glum for this child of privilege? What was so wrong that, as a teenager, with his parents’ blessing, he traveled to a tiny village outside the town of Bannu in a remote corner of Pakistan to attend a school for little children? His teacher, Mufti Mohammad Iltimas, obviously realized that Walker was not yet ready to be on his own and took him in. According to Newsweek, Walker slept on a rope bed in Iltimas’ home with no hot water and no electricity after 10 p.m. “He wanted to be told precisely how to dress, to eat, think, to pray” – something his parents obviously were not willing to do.
Today, Lindh and Walker wonder how their boy could have ended up trapped in a siege with a gang of terrorists. They say he never had been interested in politics in the United States but now wonder how, after they sent him to Pakistan to find himself, he could have absorbed some of the politics of radical Islam.
While little Johnny, now officially listed as a “battlefield detainee,” could face criminal charges, it appears his parents are off the hook because their son managed to survive his 18th birthday. However, they are “unfit” parents. That doesn’t mean they don’t love their son. They just didn’t love him enough to say “no” – ever.
Lindh, a lawyer, wonders why neither of his sons followed what he described as the “strict Catholic manner” of his own upbringing. Earth to Lindh: “It doesn’t matter how you were brought up. If you want your sons to believe in Catholicism or any other faith, you have to practice what you’ve learned and pass your beliefs on to your children. If you don’t, someone else will.” Perhaps if little Johnny had been memorizing the Bible at seven, he wouldn’t have been absorbed with memorizing all 6,666 sentences of the Koran at 17.
If Mr. Lindh truly believed what he learned from his Catholic parents, how could he have married a Buddhist? Ms. Walker is said only to have “dabbled” in Buddhism, so it is quite obvious there was no serious commitment by either parent upon which their young son could rely.
At age 14, John went searching for answers and apparently was allowed to surf the Internet at will. He visited websites for hip-hop music, which Newsweek describes as containing “particularly crude raps on sex and violence.”
John’s youthful mind was further muddled when his parents took him out of a regular high school after only a few months and put him in an “alternative” school where students are left to plot their own courses of study and are required to check in with teachers only once a week. After reading, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” John announced he was converting to Islam. When this didn’t get a rise from his parents, he took to wearing long, white robes and a turban.
At age 17, when Mr. and Mrs. Lindh were busy splitting up, he asked to go to Yemen to learn the “pure” language of the Koran. They applauded his spiritual journey and wrote out a check. Lindh continued to write checks for his son’s quest even after he found out John supported Osama bin Laden’s terrorist attack of the USS Cole.
Now that John/Abdul has been found among the Taliban fighters, it appears he finally has his parents’ undivided attention, but will he finally get their disapproval? That remains to be seen.
