John Walker: "Poor, misled fellow.".

In February, John Philip Walker Lindh was indicted on ten criminal charges in the District Court of Virginia. What a pathetic figure John Walker is!

Captured while fighting with the Taliban at Mazar-e-Sharif, Walker survived the bloody prison uprising in which CIA officer Mike Spann was killed.

How did a young American wind up fighting for the bloodthirsty Taliban?

It is an instructive story.

John Walker was born on February 9, 1981 at Columbia Women's Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic. His parents moved to Maryland, then to California, where John was either home-schooled or was sent to "alternative" schools. At one such school he was left to devise his own curriculum, reporting to his teacher once a week. The turning point came at 16 when he read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". In California John Walker became a convert to Islam. Thenceforth, he wore a long flowing white robe and a pillbox hat, and called himself "Suleyman".

His parents didn't object; their creed was "nonjudgementalism". His mother dabbled in Buddhism. His father said they were "proud of John for pursuing an alternative course." John told his parents he converted because Islam is "a gentle and peaceful religion".

It is not, of course. Muslim history is replete with conflict and bloodshed; its holy book, the Koran, describes perpetual enmity between Muslim and non-Muslim. Adherents are admonished to "fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them".

But how could John Walker know this? He was a true child of our dumbed-down, postmodern times.

His parents had named him after Beatle John ["Give peace a chance"] Lennon. As moderns, they imposed no spiritual discipline in the home. At the alternative schools (to the limited extent that he was taught anything at all), he was taught that there is no such thing as right or wrong, true or false. Everything is relative. Construct your own reality. Discover your own truth. All religions are inherently subjective and pretty much interchangeable. Mr. Walker, Sr. said that he encouraged John "to choose his own spiritual path". How often have we heard this nonsensical statement from parents!

Well, choose John did, and it took him first to Yemen where he tried to memorize all 6,666 sentences of the Koran. Then it took him to a "madrasa", an Islamic brainwashing school, in the village of Bannu in Northwest Pakistan. According to his teacher, Mufti Mohammed Iltimas, John was a model student; he wanted to be told everything - how to dress, what to eat, how to pray, what to think.

From Pakistan he went to the Taliban trenches and fortified bunkers around Mazar-e-Sharif where he was captured.

John Walker's odyssey is a sort of Pilgrim's Progress in reverse, a journey from the celestial city to the City of Destruction, from that biblical "city set upon a hill", which America's founding fathers aspired to create, to a remote dark corner of Afghanistan.

Along the way, his parents lost track of him. But when the USS Cole was bombed in Aden, with the loss of 17 American sailors, John wrote home justifying this Al Qa'eda terrorist act. We don't know what his father's response was ("Whatever", most likely) but he continued to send John money. Then his parents saw a CNN clip of a bearded, unkempt soldier captured under the name Abdul Hamid, and they recognized their son.

President Bush has referred to Walker as "a poor fellow" who had been "misled". As Governor of Texas, George Bush was notoriously unreceptive to pleas for clemency from "poor fellows" who were facing the death penalty. It seems unlikely that his Administration will wish to create a precedent of leniency in the war on terrorism.

In one sense, however, Bush's characterization of Walker as a "poor misled fellow" is correct. Walker was misled by our postmodernist culture. When John Walker chose Islam, he chose something diametrically opposed to the liberal pablum on which he had been nurtured. Walker once told his Islamic "jihadists" (his term) that in the U.S. people deify themselves, leaving no time for family or community. "In the U.S. I feel alone", he said. "Here...I feel comfortable and at home".

Instances of what William Blake called "fearful symmetry" are sometimes so simple and stark as to defy elaboration.

John Walker, "poor, misled fellow".

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario.