Newsweek had an article on Walker's background. Some excerpts:

He was a bright, quiet kid from the heart of hot-tub country. How did John Walker Lindh go from hip-hop to holy war?



...Most teenagers, when they rebel, say they want more freedom. John Walker Lindh rebelled against freedom. He did not demand to express himself in different ways. Quite the opposite. He wanted to be told precisely how to dress, to eat, to think, to pray. He wanted a value system of absolutes, and he was willing to go to extreme lengths to find it.

...Speaking with Mufti Iltimas, Lindh was critical of America as a land that exalted self above all else. Americans were so busy pursuing their personal goals, he said, that they had no time for their families or communities.

...Walker’s parents, San Francisco lawyer Frank Lindh and his legally estranged wife, Marilyn, were horrified. Their son was “sweet” and “shy,” they said. How could he have ended up trapped in a siege with a gang of terrorists?

The story of John Phillip Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman al-Faris, a.k.a. Abdul Hamid (his Taliban nom de guerre), a.k.a. John Walker, is one of the truly perplexing and intriguing mysteries of the post-September 11 universe. He grew up in possibly the most liberal, tolerant place in America, yet he was drawn to the most illiberal, intolerant sect in Islam, the Taliban.

...John Walker, to use the name that has stuck, may remain a psychological puzzle. But he can be at least partly understood as a product of—or, more precisely, a reaction against—the culture and mores of a certain time and place. He was born in 1981, a year after the end of the so-called Me Decade that gave rise to a host of self-improvement and self-realization fads. His adolescent years were spent in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

Marin County has been gently mocked by the cartoon strip “Doonesbury” as the epicenter of the self-esteem movement, a land of hot tubs, Rolfing and est, a bastion of moral relativism where divorces were for a time listed alongside marriages in the newspaper.

Walker was named John after John Lennon, the Beatle. His father says he was not bothered when his two sons rejected the “strict Catholic manner” of his own upbringing.

His mother was a child of the ’60s who dabbled in Buddhism and home-schooled John for a time.

He was sent to an elite alternative high school where students were allowed to shape their own studies and had to check in with their teacher only once a week.

...[After his conversion to Islam] Walker’s parents balked at calling him “Suleyman” (he remained “John” to them), but they tried to be nonjudgmental, even supportive, about his conversion. They were “proud of John for pursuing an alternative course,” says his father. They did not object when he dropped out and took the high-school-diploma equivalency exam.

At about this time, late 1998, Walker’s parents were splitting up. Frank went to live with a friend, Bill Jones, and Marilyn moved to a nearby apartment with young daughter Naomi.

Their teenage son became obsessed with memorizing the Quran and the Sharia, Islam’s elaborate, fixed rules for living and worship. He became convinced that he needed to go to Yemen because Yemeni Arabic was the closest to the “pure” language of the Quran.

His parents, though strapped for money because of their separation, agreed to pay for it. Frank later told NEWSWEEK that he wanted to support his son’s “passion” and “commitment to learning.”

...Frank Lindh e-mailed his son to lament that some of the 17 young sailors killed in the [Cole] blast were the same age as his son. Walker wrote back that bringing the U.S. destroyer into a Yemeni harbor was “an act of war” against Islam. His son’s message “raised my concerns,” Frank told NEWSWEEK, “but my days of molding him were over.”

Frank disagreed with his son, but he didn’t cut off the money

(In Bannu, [Afghanistan] Walker turned down the offer of an air conditioner as decadent, but he took an additional $1,200 from his father.)

...It never occurred to Frank and Marilyn that their son would become a holy warrior. “He was the last person you would expect to go and fight,” Frank told NEWSWEEK. Added Marilyn: “He would freeze. He’s totally not streetwise.”

Walker’s parents had not heard a word from their son after he left the madrasa at Bannu in May 2001. Marilyn had written her son, “I really need to hear your voice,” but she got no answer.

...When Frank Lindh at last saw the videotape of his wounded and battered son being loaded onto a hospital gurney, he sobbed uncontrollably. His friends had to hold him up. Marilyn also seemed to be in shock when NEWSWEEK interviewed her the next day. Her son, she said, had been “brainwashed.” When the TV satellite trucks showed up outside and the death threats began, she fled with her daughter to an undisclosed location.

Frank, meanwhile, embarked on the TV talk-show circuit. He steadfastly refused to be judgmental. “I don’t think John was doing anything wrong,” he told CBS’s “The Early Show.”

To ABC’s “Good Morning America” he said, “We want to give him a big hug and then a little kick in the butt for not telling us what he was up to.” He gently chided his son for not “coming to Papa” for permission.

As for Walker’s comment to NEWSWEEK that he “supported” the September 11 attacks, Lindh suggested that his son may have been in shock (he may have been otherwise addled; Walker said he had been a heavy hashish user, according to one Northern Alliance source).

The family’s latest defense is that their son did not have access to Western media, only the Taliban version of September 11, which may not have reported the atrocities and civilian death toll.

Just in case the U.S. government did not share this benign view of his son’s activities, Frank Lindh went out and hired one of the best-known trial lawyers in America, James Brosnahan, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Iran-contra case.



* * *

It would be nice if I could just leave this without comment. But...

No doubt many liberals are going, "What? What's your point?" Like the writer of the article, Walker's defection is, to them, still one of the "truly perplexing and intriguing mysteries" of our time.

The conservatives reading this know precisely why Walker turned out like he did. It's as obvious as a day-glo orange elephant. The permissiveness. The complete lack of moral, or even common-sense guidance. "Legally estranged" parents. Dad leaves Mom and moves in with "friend" Bill Jones. Etc. etc.

It's so obvious, it's almost like a satire from "Saturday Night Live."

To a conservative, it's a wonder that that Walker didn't go even loonier. Can't wait to see what the poor daughter turns out like.