Hip Hop Culture Blamed Again

The following is excerpted from a longer article that ran in Davey D's weekly Hip Hop newsletter:

This morning I get a call from my man Jahi who does a lot of community work in the Baltimore-Wash, DC area...Dude called me up this morning, and said to peep the article on MSNBC about the 'American Taliban' John Walker. This is the young white cat from Marin County here in the Bay Area who is accused of fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan.

	"His family says the turning point may have come at the age of 16 when he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which describes the conversion to Islam of the famous black militant. Some Internet postings examined by NEWSWEEK show that young Walker soon became pretty militant himself."

Many are calling him a traitor and suggesting that he be charged with treason in the death of an American CIA agent who interviewed him hours before a prison uprising resulting in his death.

Well, just when you thought you heard it all... MSNBC comes out with an article that will soon appear in Newsweek called 'From Hip Hop to Holy War.' Apparently this kid who fought Americans as a Taliban soldier was a Hip Hop head. In fact he supposedly got introduced to Islam via Hip Hop. Young Jonathan Walker was a frequent visitor to Hip Hop websites where he often debated cats and even posed as an African American to take on various issues or issue his own statements. Homeboy questioned the sincerity of Nas and questioned why he considered himself a 'God' while smoking blunts and fornicating. Mr. Walker had lots of questions for the Five Percent Nation.

Here's a sampling of what I read on the MSNBC site..

"Walker discovered his passion for Islam online, after sampling other possibilities. At the age of 14, under the handle doodoo, he was visiting Web sites for hip-hop music with particularly crude raps on sex and violence. In one e-mail posting, he scorned a critic of hip-hop as a worthless d 'krider. In one e-mail at the height of his fascination with hip-hop, he appeared to pose as an African-American, writing, 'Our blackness should not make white people hate us.' But as he got older, he veered to a very different direction. He began visiting Islamic Web sites, asking questions like 'Is it all right to watch cartoons on TV or in the movies?' His family says the turning point may have come at the age of 16 when he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which describes the conversion to Islam of the famous black militant. Some Internet postings examined by NEWSWEEK show that young Walker soon became pretty militant himself. In a 1997 message to a hip-hop site, he demanded to know why a rapper named Nas is indeed a God. ' If this is so,' Walker indignantly asks, 'then why does he smoke blunts, drink Moet, fornicate, and make dukey music? That''s a rather pathetic god, if you ask me.' He quizzes an online correspondent about the Five Percent Nation of Islam, 'a small North American sect' about its adherents vision of bliss and how to pursue it.' I have never seen happiness myself, ' writes Walker. 'Perhaps you can enlighten me ... where I can go to sneak a peek at it.' Selling off his hip-hop CD collection on a rap-music message board, he converted to Islam."

Peep the rest of the story to see what I mean.

Call me paranoid or call me being overly cautious, but my ears and eyes always perk up when you mention Hip Hop. This is the one art form from America that has spread out and been embraced all over the world. Hip Hop has always come under fire, so when it shows up in a Newsweek article with the details that it does with regard to this subject, I have to take note. Homeboy [Jonathan Walker] says he was introduced to Islam via Hip Hop websites, Hip Hop message boards and the Five Percent Nation. Does this mean all these outlets are going to somehow be blamed in some sensationalistic perverted way for this 'young' 'innocent' white guy who went to fight for the Taliban? If I hadn't seen such nonsense take place in other situations I wouldn't raise the red flag, but I have.