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  e's
really a good boy," explains a puzzled Frank Lindh about his
son, Abdul Hamid, a.k.a. Sulayman al Faris, a.k.a. John Walker (take
that, Dad), a.k.a. John Philip Walker Lindh. Mr. Lindh is amicably
separated (natch) from Abdul's mother, Marilyn Walker, who is a
Buddhist (natch) and equally stumped about how their "sweet,
shy" 20-year-old son wound up becoming one of Osama bin Laden's
armed jihad warriors. A clearly confused Lindh told Larry King his
son "appears to have been a combatant with the Taliban,"
but, "I don't know of any information, any suggestion of any
information indicating that he's done anything wrong."
Lindh hopes
that Abdul will be "debriefed by the government and then come
on home." I wonder if the yellow ribbons are up at the Lindh
and Walker homes, where a "swift kick in the butt" awaits
Abdul for traveling to Afghanistan without his parents' permission.
Lindh apparently thinks things had been going swimmingly until that
last change of address. John Walker converted to Islam at age 16
and dropped out of high school in favor of taking up studies at
a mosque in San Francisco, where he apparently missed the "Islam
means peace" lesson plans. At age 17, with his parents' financial
support, he headed to Yemen to study Arabic. Following the October
2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors,
father and son had an "uncomfortable e-mail exchange,"
in which "Sulayman" claimed that it was an act of war
for the ship to dock in the Yemeni port, implying that the sailors
got what they deserved.
Sulayman was
next in Pakistan, where his father wired him $1,200, although he
wouldn't be there much longer as he planned to go "somewhere
cooler." Well, where the Taliban reigned was obviously way
cooler, because according to (now) Abdul "the Taliban are the
only government that actually provides Islamic law." On Sunday
morning, November 25th, Abdul was among the captured Taliban when
they revolted in the fortress outside Mazir-e Sharif. During the
revolt, CIA agent John (Mike) Spann was beaten to death.
The father
in California who can't quite figure out what, if anything, went
wrong is described by Newsweek as a "strict Irish Catholic."
Here, my own sons are the experts. Either one of them would have
no trouble predicting how their strict Irish Catholic father would
react to the milestones Abdul passed on his way to that fortress
in Afghanistan. Their unenlightened father thinks that the "really
good" American boys in the Middle East were onboard the USS
Cole.
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