The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (23 page)

The trajectory of Bilardi’s life is also disquieting evidence that the hard-line Leftist slant of public school education, not just in the United States but all over the West, is not only endangering the future of the free world, but even serving as a recruitment tool for the global jihad.

Jake Bilardi was a conscientious young man who had co-founded a children’s charitable organization, Soccer for Hope, to get soccer balls to poor children in Uganda.
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But his education led him onto a path that his elders who admired him for his social conscience would never have expected. Shortly before his death, he wrote a lengthy blog post explaining the evolution of his thinking, his embrace of Islam, and his decision to become not only a jihadist but a suicide bomber.
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Bilardi’s post begins with a direct denial of the poverty-causes-terrorism claim and a forthright declaration that he soon plans to carry out a “martyrdom operation”—that is, to kill himself while murdering infidels:

           
With my martyrdom operation drawing closer, I want to tell you my story, how I came from being an Atheist school student in
affluent Melbourne to a soldier of the Khilafah preparing to sacrifice my life for Islam in Ramadi, Iraq. . . .

                
My life in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs was, despite having its ups and downs just like everyone else, very comfortable. I found myself excelling in my studies, just as my siblings had, and had dreamed of becoming a political journalist. . . .

Bilardi explained that he had a fascination with Islamic culture and Muslim countries from an early age, and when he started hearing about the war on terror he was skeptical of the mainstream narrative: “I saw the foreign troops burning villages, raping local women and girls, rounding up innocent young men as suspected terrorists and sending them overseas for torture, gunning down women, children and the elderly in the streets and indiscriminately firing missiles from their jets. Who was I to believe was the terrorist?”

Bilardi praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and retailed a great deal of jihadist polemic about alleged American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and supposed Israeli enormities against the Palestinians, echoing the usual Leftist justifications for supporting the Palestinian jihad against Israeli civilians, saying with unintentional irony that “the true problem was, not Israel, nor Israelis but the religious ideology that governed them”:

           
I began to support the violent resistance in the Gaza Strip, recognising that it was this resistance that kept small pockets of Palestine from the hands of the Jews, even if it does mean that they are frequently hit with airstrikes. Also, the presence of a base to attack Israel from the west was always a sign of hope, especially considering the current aggressive advance of the Islamic State from the East and as well as the bayah [pledge of allegiance] to the Khilafah by the mujahideen in Egypt’s Sinai
Peninsula potentially allowing for attacks from all directions to liberate Palestine.

In this way, Bilardi said, he “transitioned from being a reluctant-supporter of Islamic militant groups in different lands to become certain that violent global revolution was the answer to the world’s ills.”

Education for Treason

The young jihadi’s thinking offers an intriguing study of how the Leftist, anti-American perspective that dominates public school textbooks today warps young minds:

           
In the course of my research I decided to delve deeper into the bloodstained history of the world. I learnt for the first time in great detail, the scale of the atrocities committed against the native population of the Americas by both the British and Spanish colonialist forces. About how both nations attempted to completely wipe out the natives in order to build their own respective civilisations, slaughtering millions of innocent people, intentionally spreading disease amongst them and raping the native women in an effort to breed-out the present race. I also learned more about the similar systematic genocide in my own country, Australia, the stories they choose to leave out when you’re in history class at school.

Of course they don’t really leave such stories out; they are practically all that is taught nowadays, particularly when it comes to Islam and the Crusades:

           
I learnt about how the Crusaders rampaged across Europe and the Middle East, seeking to eliminate Islam from the region and restore the rule of the Catholic Church.

In reality, the Crusaders never had any intention of eliminating Islam from the region and made no attempt to do so.

Jake Bilardi went on to repeat a great deal more Leftist agitprop—sounding for all the world like a typical public school student of the early twenty-first century who has swallowed uncritically the worldview of his teachers. This hatred of America and the West meshed nicely in his mind with denial about the Islamic State’s atrocities—really the jihadis are the victims of an oppressive and unjust West:

           
Whenever America goes to war now, they claim it is simply humanitarian intervention. Take their recent airstrikes against the Islamic State, they hyped-up the story of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, making unsubstantiated claims of genocide before admitting the situation was greatly exaggerated and it was not much of an issue. But this correction came after the first missile had been fired and therefore, they were already in, so . . . ‘Well, we can’t pull out now’ . . . Now as a result, every day the Americans are firing missiles at innocent Muslims in both Iraq and Sham.

“It was also through these two successive American-led campaigns to impose the Democratic system upon the world,” said Bilardi, “that I woke up to the reality of what this ideology was, nothing but a system of lies and deception.” He came to harbor “complete hatred and opposition to the entire system Australia and the majority of the world was based upon,” and determined that “violent global revolution was necessary to eliminate this system of governance and that it [sic] I would likely be killed in this struggle.” But violent revolution in the service of what? “What would replace,” he asked, the rotten Western system of democracy? “Socialism? Communism?? Nazism??? I was never quite sure.”

Bilardi’s hatred of the U.S. and its interventionism coincided with what he was reading in the Qur’an, which he had picked up because of his admiration for the mujahideen:

           
As I read through the Qur’an, I couldn’t help but make strong associations between the speech of Allah (azza wa’jal) and the chaotic scenes around the world today. For example, Allah (azza wa’jal) says, “And when it is said to them: ‘Make not mischief on the Earth’, they say: ‘We are only peace-makers.’ Verily! They are the ones who make mischief, but they perceive it not.” [Surat al-Baqarah 2:11–12]. Is this not the reality of the kuffar today? Who claim to be helping to free the people while doing nothing but increasing their suffering.

Thus he finally “began to truly understand what I had focused on studying for more than five years, the motivation of the mujahideen: The doctrine of jihad and it’s [sic] superiority in Islam.” John Kerry might be surprised to learn that the young suicide bomber says nothing at this juncture about poverty or a lack of economic opportunity.

Now he understood “the concept of jihad, it’s
[sic] benefits, it’s [sic] importance and the rewards for taking part in military operations to raise Islam in the land.” And the more he learned, “the more I desired to join the mujahideen.”

Bilardi had originally agreed with “the assessment of the mischief-makers that the Islamic State were from the khawarij,” the seventh-century rigorists who fought, as we have seen, against all other Muslims, and that accordingly it was “a duty upon others to slaughter the mujahideen of the Islamic State.” However, the more he had online discussions with Muslims who had joined the Islamic State, the more he began to come around to their point of view. He acknowledged forthrightly that in this matter, might made right: “As the Islamic State began to expand, seizing the cities of Raqqah, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and others, Allah (azza wa’jal) Himself exposed the lies of the liars and humiliated the enemies of the State, a clear sign that they were upon the truth.”

As he came to admire and approve ISIS, he was also “growing tired of the corruption and filthiness of Australian society and yearned to live under the Islamic State with the Muslims.” But failing, at first, to find any way to get there, he decided instead to wage jihad right at home, launching “a string of bombings across Melbourne, targeting foreign consulates and political/military targets as well as grenade and knife attacks on shopping centres and cafes and culminating with myself detonating a belt of explosives amongst the kuffar.”