MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“A mind hijacked by radicalism”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, October 9, 2011
They tried.
It wasn’t enough. Probably nothing would have been. But Zafar and Sarah Khan did everything they could think of to pull their son Samir back from the cliff of violent jihadist radicalism.
They talked and they pleaded. They enlisted the help of relatives and friends. They had Islamic scholars talk to the boy, trying to convince him that praising Allah was not the same as killing innocent civilians and that the path he was choosing to follow led not to enlightenment but to pain, brutality, hatred and loss.
None of it seemed to work at all.
The immigrant parents watched with growing 
torment as their beloved Samir went from Westbury high-school student to troubled young adult to chief internet propagandist for the al Qaeda terror network — then, in a Hellfire burst from above, to unexpected casualty of a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan.
No two cases are alike, of course. The fundamentalist madness that gripped Samir Khan is different from the drug addiction that captures some children and the religious cults that imprison others and the countless other ways in which children are yanked from their mothers’ and fathers’ loving grip.
But these cases are alike in one way: Whatever those parents may try, sometimes it is not enough.
The Khans’ son is dead now, and that would be an unspeakable heartbreak for any parent. But the more we learn about this young man’s disturbing descent, the more we can see how desperately his parents tried to a
vert it.
In the end, what else can any parent do?
His tragedy is now their tragedy. It is all of ours. The particulars are unique, as they always are. But it’s a story as universal as parents and children.
These parents, like many parents before them, tried to save their child and failed.
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
Related posts
