American Taliban’s Dad
A father's delusions about his Taliban son.

December 5, 2001 8:45 a.m.

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.