“Jihad Johnny” Soon Flies Free “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh started as a hip-hop critic and wannabe Malcom X. Lloyd Billingsley
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273592/jihad-johnny-soon-flies-free-lloyd-billingsley
Next month John Walker Lindh will gain release from federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after a 20 year sentence for fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Americans may know little about Jihad Johnny’s service for the Taliban, and less about his career as a fake hip-hop critic.
“Lindh, now 25, has largely disappeared from public attention since his imprisonment in October 2002,” wrote Philip Sherwell in a 2006 Telegraph piece headlined “The New Malcolm X?” In prison Lindh was known as “Hamza” and commanded such stature that “religious advisor” Shakeel Syed told him that he could become “the new Malcolm X.”
In upscale Marin County, California, Lindh attended the elite “alternative” Tamiscal High school. After seeing the 1992 Spike Lee movie Malcolm X, Lindh converted to Islam and began using the name “Suleyman.” That was hardly the student’s only affectation, as James Best confirmed in “Black Like Me,” a 2003 article in Oakland’s East Bay Express, subtitled “John Walker Lindh’s hip-hop daze.”
Under the name Mustafa Naim Mujahid, Lindh wrote online that he was “born in Chocolate City,” Washington DC, and “raised in its vanilla suburbs.” Under the pseudonym “John Doe” he wrote “an excoriating lyrical tirade against rappers of every variety, from Too $hort to Sista Souljah to Marley Marl.” As Best notes, the Lindh was especially cruel to rappers he believed to have gone pop and thereby compromised their blackness.
In his internet texts, Lindh identified himself as an African American in an online hip-hop newsgroup “in order to lecture and reproach African Americans for rap lyrics and discussions.” In an online group devoted to Islam, Lindh recast himself as “Mr. Mujahi” the Muslim “holy warrior” and “sermonized on the tenets of strict fundamentalist Islam.” He was also Prof. J., “the Koranic scholar and anti-Zionist.”
According to Best, Lindh was “intellectually in debt to the black nationalist strain of hip-hop whose influence peaked in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.” This strain was “elementally informed by the Nation of Islam, the 5 Percent Nation of Gods and Earths and, to a lesser and mostly symbolic extent, the Black Panther Party.”
The Nation of Islam influence explains Lindh’s charge against Masta Ace whose, “simple rhymes are crafted to make money for the grafted,” As Best explains, the term “grafted” is a reference to “the Nation of Islam’s racial creation mythology, which positions Africans as ‘original’ and whites as direct descendants of a mad scientist named Yakub, who was exiled from Africa for his deviousness and concocted the white race in a laboratory as revenge.”
Lindh was “clearly obsessed with race,” and his theme was “the corruption of blackness and African-American identity through black avarice and white influence.” He applied to Dr. Dre “a favorite analogy of Nation of Islam-era Malcolm, that of the ‘field slave’ as revolutionary, and the ‘house slave’ as servile and bought-off.”
In the view of Lindh, Dr. Dre was a “sellout house nigga living honkey dory.” And as Lindh wrote of Dre’s Death Row record label:
Make a buck and making ten for Bubba Jimmy Jethrow.
Exploitation that’s been spread from the plantation
To the so-called “black radio stations” tests my patience.
Spreading stereotypes to give a chuckle to Caucasians.
And so on. As Best recalled, “Lindh aspired to become a hip-hop musician himself.” Instead he moved on to Yemen then Afghanistan, for training in an Al-Qaeda camp. Osama bin Laden his own self swung by and thanked them all for taking part in the jihad. After Walker Lindh’s capture, a reporter asks “And did you enjoy the jihad? I mean, was it a good cause for you?” Jihad Johnny replied, “definitely,” and he was on record that jihad is “the goal of every Muslim.”
John Walker Lindh was a bust in his online Black Like Me, and despite efforts, he was not the new Malcolm X. The high-concept film for this guy would be something like From Airhead to Towelhead. On the other hand, the story is much more than a comedy.
According to his father Frank Lindh, a wealthy corporate lawyer, “John loves America.” With no apology to Frank, those who love America do not join Islamic jihadist movements and fight against America.
“He was a soldier in the Taliban,” the jihadist’s attorney James Brosnahan helpfully clarified. “He did it for religious reasons. He did it as a Muslim, and history overcame him,” with deadly consequences.
In the uprising during which Lindh was captured, CIA man Johnny Spann was killed. His widow, Gail Spann, told reporters “I do not want him [Lindh] out.” Many relatives of jihad victims feel likewise, but Lindh is still slated for release on May 23. The still-militant “American Taliban,” now 38, plans to head for Ireland, but says he knows “virtually nothing” about the Irish government. For their part, the Irish may wonder what their newly minted citizen is all about.
Just so they know, he’s the guy who left America, became a jihadist, and fought against America. Before that, he was the online critic, influenced by the Nation of Islam, who decried the “grafted” and branded the African American Dr. Dre a “sellout house nigga living honkey dory.”
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