Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: December 9, 2001.
A Fortnight ago two Americans met
in the northern Afghan desert, at the Qala-i- Jhangi prison. One was a
CIA special-ops man, Mike Spann. The other was a prisoner he was interrogating,
a Taliban soldier called "Abdul Hamid", the nom de guerre of John Walker,
formerly of northern California.
Mr Spann will be buried tomorrow
by his wife and three young children in Arlington National Cemetery. He
was kicked, beaten and apparently bitten to death in an uprising of captured
Taliban, who then booby-trapped his body with grenades.
Mr Walker, by contrast, is one of
86 people to survive the four-day prison battle, and the question now is
what to do with him.
If nothing else, he's usefully nailed
one of the self-serving myths peddled after the awesome intelligence failure
of September 11: awfully sorry we failed to see it coming, said the high-ranking
suits, but it's impossible to do any covert deep-cover stuff out in Afghanistan;
these fellows are all cousins and brothers-in-law - a guy from Jersey would
stick out like a lap-dancer in a burqa.
As we now know, instead of being
full of fearsome Pashtun warriors renowned down the centuries, the Omar/
Osama ranks were like a novelty Gap ad, "Losers of Many Nations" - misfit
Saudis, Pakistanis, Brits and Californians.
Anyone can walk in off the street
and be assistant supervisor of the third-floor latrine in Tora Bora by
nightfall. The only distinguishing feature about John Walker is that he's
such an obvious compendium of clapped-out cliches from America's Left Coast
the wonder is the mullahs didn't automatically take him for a CIA plant.
Mr Walker was born John Lindh in
1981, and comes from a bastion of well-heeled dopehead progressivism, California's
Marin County. Just north of San Francisco, it is a place where your average
hippy-turned-lawyer stays true to his Sixties values on property that stays
true to its late Nineties values (average house price: just shy of a million
bucks).
Following the traditional Marin
pattern, his parents divorced, his mother converted to Buddhism, and the
children were taught Native American spirituality. John went to an "alternative"
high school. (In the Bay Area, they are all "alternative". The problem
for parents is trying to find any alternative to the alternative.)
The set texts included The Autobiography
of Malcolm X, and John liked it so much that, like the late Mr X, he decided
to embrace Islam and change his name, to Sulayman. His parents, putting
their foot down for what seems to be the first and last time, demanded
the right to continue calling him John.
They had, after all, named him after
one of the colossi of the age, John Lennon. To this, he consented. In return,
they let him study at the Mill Valley Islamic Centre.
In 1998, after an awkward trip to
their ancestral Ireland in which John trudged dutifully round the auld
sod wearing his turban and white robes, Frank Lindh agreed to let the 17-year-old
spend a year in Yemen, on the next stage of his "spiritual odyssey".
Last year, John e-mailed home to
say al-Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole was justified - oh, and by the way
he was off to enrol in a Pakistani madrassa. So Dad wired him a couple
thousand bucks, which goes a long way in Bannu.
Aside from a glowing school report
from his Imam, that was the last Mr Lindh heard from Junior until he turned
up brandishing an AK47 and declaring his approval of the events of September
11.
John Walker's CV bears eloquent
testament to his parents' scrupulous observance of the Bay Area's First
Commandment: Thou shalt be non-judgemental. Yeah, man, Yemen. Cool. As
one headline put it: "A Product Of Bay Area Culture".
Exactly, I thought. But, this being
The San Francisco Chronicle, they were applying the label with pride. Rhapsodising
about the region's "religious tolerance" and the way children are taught
to value "critical thinking about the US role in the world", Louis Freedberg
concluded that Walker's only misfortune was that "his search for identity
intersected precisely with the World Trade Centre attacks".
If not for this unfortunate "intersection",
he might have become an "idealistic doctor". The President, he said, should
allow the boy home "and let him get his life back on track. We'd want nothing
less for our own children, who could easily have found themselves in a
similar mess."
In fairness to the youth of northern
California, that last part is an unjust slur. The marvel is that, after
labouring under the twin burdens of the education system's multicultural
orthodoxies and the preening moral superiority of their boomer parents,
no more Bay Area teens have signed on with Mullah Omar.
None the less, there is a difference
between "tolerance" of other cultures and the moral inertia displayed by
the Lindhs. We can, in any case, guess the limits of Marin County's much-vaunted
"tolerance".
Imagine that the Marinated Muslim
had instead announced that he was going to do what the late Mike Spann
did at his age: enlist in the Marines. Would Marilyn Walker have seen that
as a valid part of his "self-discovery"? Or would she have got out her
joss sticks and wailed, "Oh, my God, where did we go wrong?"
Mom says she's "proud" of John,
but says he must have been "brainwashed". From the look of him, his brain's
the only thing that's been washed: John Walker resembles one of those cadaverous,
deranged guys who stumble up to you late at night at Greyhound bus stations
and demand money for medication.
But right now that's shrewd image-positioning.
President Bush seems to have bought the "misguided" line, describing Walker
as a "poor fellow" who thought he was fighting for a "great cause". "I
can't see him as being unpatriotic," says a neighbour. "This is where his
journey led him."
For four decades, "non-judgemental"
flower-children like Marilyn Walker have reflexively characterised men
like Mike Spann as the dark agents of Right-wing militarism. We are entitled
to judge Marilyn's son, the comrade of Spann's killers, as the dark agent
of Left-wing Marinism.
Raised by peaceniks and Marinated
in "tolerance", he took up an AK47 in defence of misogynists and gay-bashers:
not a paradox, but the logical reductio of the Left's moral nullity. Cocooned
in one of the most prosperous enclaves on the planet, he was taught everything
- from Buddhism to Malcolm X - except what it means to be an American citizen.
When a 13-year-old girl wants an
abortion, the Marin County crowd insists that "a woman's right to choose"
is sacred. Twenty-year-old men make choices, too. John Walker chose to
go to war against his own country. Americans should respect his "right
to choose" and let him live with the consequences.
I'm not in favour of trying him
for treason: Alan Dershowitz and the other high-rent lawyers are already
salivating over the possibility of a two-year circus with attendant book
deals and TV movies. But there is another way: on page four of John Walker's
US passport, it states that any American who enlists in a foreign army
automatically loses his citizenship.
Mr Walker wants to be Abdul Hamid:
Mr Bush should honour his wishes. Let us leave him to the Northern Alliance
and let his San Francisco fancypants lawyers petition to appear before
the Kabul bar, if there is one. It would, surely, be grossly discriminatory
to subject Mr Hamid to non-Islamic justice.
