Quite simply any pouty depressed or pity-partying teen with a narcissistic/megalomanic streak and looking for a cause is a potentially eager tool ripe for the picking as another IS pawn.

So its time to stand up for the tools who would become such fodder and oppose the IS recruiter pimps who are targetting and grooming them, massaging their fragile egos with spin then leading their recruited tools to the slaughter they’ve convinced them will make them heroes.

Skinny little 18 year old Australian teenager, Jake Bilardi lost his mother to cancer in 2012 when he was 15. He was apparently a good student but socially a failure. He lost his way with atheism and in his grief and disillusionment with Australia’s Christian society ‘found Islam’ through a local Muslim youth group. And so like a ‘wigger‘, he got so obsessive in ’embracing the culture’ he fixated on not just becoming a muslim, but taking it to the rather Obsessive Compulsive extreme of wanting to be a ‘hero’ of the ‘muslim cause’. Of course that depended on what cause he found.

For most muslims the cause is love, not going and joining a death cult that buries children alive, crucifies them, rapes, kidnaps, tortures and kills as many people as possible as long as they are not in ‘his club’. So he didn’t join that cause, that moderate cause. There was no ego massage in that cause, no narcissistic fix, no promise of heroism or paradise where he’d find himself in suicide bomber heaven with his pick of pubescent virgins to endlessly work his way through. So instead he was drawn to ‘the real cause’. And so, in Aspie obsessive compulsive style he fixated on that great pillar of truth, the news.

Fixating on the news, Jake Bilardi found his ‘heroes’ in the homoeroticism of self inflated, armed older men rampaging atop 4 wheel drives in a blood lust orgy. He found his heroes in snipers and suicide bombers, in balaclava clad death cult ‘leaders’, and so his ‘purpose’, his ‘calling’, his belief in himself as a future hero was found.

So after being groomed by ‘father figures’ and filling himself with enough hate he couldn’t wait to start killing in loyalty to his new ‘father figures’. He got his ‘lucky break’ and left his bomb making equipment, his knives, at his Craigieburn home in Melbourne and got on a flight to join the non Islamic, non state of “Islamic State“.

Bathing in the homoeroticism of being their new kid on the block and posing like an excited ‘wigger’ amidst his darker, hairier post-pubescent amosexual heroes, Jake Bilardi poses like a trio posing with their symbolic penises.

Now a valued white Aussie Jihadi they utilise him as a kind of walking symbolic ‘up yours’ to the Western world and he revels in being their narcissistic object.

Now a valued mascot to his older, bigger, more macho leaders, Jake Bilardi was in his nirvana. Like any teenage puppy eyed idol worshipping sychophant, Jake Bilardi was willing to die for his leaders. So previously filled with burning shame at being Australian, he was no bursting with pride to get on a waiting list of suicide bombers. Lining up with those like himself probably made him feel for once in his life that he was not a freak, that among these wannabe suicide bombers, he was ‘normal’.

So Jake Bilardi waited his turn and as the 11th suicide bomber ahead of him in the waiting list blew himself up, he got his turn as number 12. He detonated himself, blew his 18 year old body to fragments and injured a few Iraqi soldiers in the process. With it, he blew to bits his mind, a mind that believed it was a martyr, a hero, on its way to paradise.

If anyone like this was a sensitive but alienated gay youth maybe they’d have found paradise with a loving macho partner who drove a 4 wheel drive and lived in a chic city apartment where they could have become their partner’s adoring prince and married, even raised a family and been the loving, caring humanitarian they imagined themselves to be. But we do not live in a society which allows youth to talk about even the possibilities of such orientation, desires, life dreams. Nor do we live in a society which listens to the grief and loss and alienation, or mental health of sad and angry skinny little white guys like Jake Bilardi. We have a leader of this country who doesn’t listen to youth at all and thinks ‘electronic graffiti’ says nothing of significance worth hearing. But I am hearing Jake Bilardi.

Jake Bilardi died in vain in the cause he believed he was part of. But he need not have died in vain in terms of a cause he had no idea he was part of. For in my view Jake Bilardi speaks to us from the grave about an Australian nation playing sychophant itself to American war mongering. He speaks to us about an Australian nation that ignores the mental health of its teenage youth or believes in funding in Christian-only counselors which atheist, gay, muslim youth are meant to be able to relate to, confide in. Jake Bilardi speaks to us about an Australian nation proud enough its bigotry, its racism, its torture of asylum seekers, its imprisonment of children, its overt facilitation of sexual abuse of children in detention, its forcing of Indigenous people’s off their own tribal lands to keep supporting the likes of Tony Abbott and his ilk. Jake Bilardi talks to us about our un-Australian greed, defended privilege, our our disregard for those in need, our self congratulatory hypocrisy.

So many of us have all been Jake Bilardi. But joining a death cult that commits atrocities that trump even all the everyday illness of Australian society today, is not the answer. Jake Bilardi could have been a spokesperson for alienated youth in Australia and helped change our society for something less alienating, less hypocritical, less pandering to imperialism, less totalitarian. We needed the passion of youth like Jake Bilardi but instead he was groomed and utilised by the death cult of IS.