Two mothers' sons: different faiths, different fates
Sunday October 06 2002
One victim of the current intifada was 19-year-old Jonathan (Yoni) Jesner from Glasgow who died two weeks ago, a day after he was blown up on a Tel Aviv bus by a Hamas suicide bomber. Yoni had been studying at a school for potential Rabbis and had been on the bus when the bomber struck. He sustained grievous head injuries and was rushed to hospital but later died. Yoni's parents, Joseph and Marsha, who had five children (three boys, two girls) were divorced. Joseph lives in Israel while Marsha is a teacher in a Jewish day school in Glasgow where her son, a devout Jew, taught at the local cheder (Hebrew school) and was active in Jewish youth organizations.
Yoni, was an academic high-flier and had secured a place in the medical faculty in King's College London. However, due to the actions of the Islamic terrorist his contribution to medicine was confined to the donation of vital organs for various transplants including Yasmin Abu Ramla, a 7-year-old Palestinian Muslim who received his kidney.
Yasmin had been on a transplant waiting list and undergoing dialysis for over two years. Yoni's eldest brother, Ari, said that "the family is very proud that Jonathan was able to give life to others". He was "delighted" for Yasmin's family and added that "the principle of saving a life is one of the greatest values in Judaism. Race, religion, culture, creed, is not what is important here." Yasmin's mother, Dina, said she "didn't know what to say to thank the family of the man killed in the attack". Yasmin did. As she recuperated after her operation she drew a picture of flowers, herself, a house, and of a heart in honour of the Jesner family. On the picture she wrote her name and Yoni's.
RACE, religion, culture and creed matter a lot to John Phillip Walker Lindh, the 21-year-old now known as the American Taliban. On July 11, 2001, his mother, Marilyn Walker, wrote a letter to a Pakistani friend of her son. She told Khizar Hayat that she had "lost touch with my son Sulayman Lindh ... the last I heard from him was April 26. He said he might be moving into the mountains for a cooler climate during the summer months".
On December 1, 2001, Marilyn Walker clicked on to a news website which reported the capture of an American Taliban. The accompanying photo filled her with dread. It was a photo of her son. Now she realised that the mountains to which he had been retreating were the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and that he had been going there not for cooler weather but for hot action with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.
She now knew to her horror where her son's spiritual odyssey through Islam had led. It started in 1993 when Marilyn Walker brought her 12-year-old son John to Spike Lee's film Malcolm X. He was entranced by Lee's portrait of the Muslim world and began to study Islam on the Net and to acquire obscure books about Islam. He started visiting local mosques and Islamic centres and soon after took the Islamic shahadah the affirmation that there is only one Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet. In 1997 he expressed a desire to go to Yemen to study Arabic and steep himself in Islamic culture. In early summer '98 before he headed off to Yemen, he accompanied his father on a trip to Ireland where John sought out mosques to carry out his daily salat (prayers). In Yeman he attended a language school in Sana'a but found the set-up too lax and the students too worldly. Lindh had dropped his father's surname and assumed his mother's name Walker. This may have resulted from the break-up of his parent's marriage in the late 90s when his father came out as a homosexual. Among the targets for John's venomous attacks on the Net throughout the 90s were homosexuals, along with Jews and Zionists. Homosexuality would have been regarded as extremely sinful by a strict Muslim convert like John Walker though it has been alleged that he had a sexual relationship with his Pakistani friend Khizar Hayat. That may have happened after he moved to Pakistan in October 2000 when he attended a madrasah under the aegis of Mufti Mohammad Iltimas Khan who seems to have been enamoured of Walker's "lovely face".
In April 2001 having memorised a third of the Koran Walker headed off to Kabul and enlisted in the Taliban, volunteering to fight in the jihad against the West. His faith in the Taliban was unshaken by September 11 and he continued to fight until he was arrested in Mazar-I-Sharif in November. He was interrogated on video by CIA agent Mike Spann who was shot in the subsequent Taliban revolt but Walker was recaptured and brought home to America where he was charged with terrorism on 10 different counts. After plea-bargaining he was found guilty on two counts and was sentenced to 20 years in jail last Friday. Meanwhile he remains a devout Muslim and is spending his prison time memorising the rest of the Koran.
Looking at his life in conjunction with that of Yoni Jesner it seems ironic that while the Taliban American is able to continue his Islamic studies, the Glaswegian Jew was prevented from continuing his Judaic studies by the murderous activities of Islamic terrorists. Two mothers' sons, two faiths, two different destinies.
- Declan McCormack
