Bomber Bilardi’s anti-Semitic blog posts

AUSTRALIAN teenager Jake Bilardi, who was stockpiling explosives to make a bomb in Melbourne but then became a suicide bomber in Iraq, posted on his blog that Jews will not be safe anywhere in the world.

Bilardi, who died in the March 11 attack, praised terrorists that killed Jews in Paris, Brussels and Toulouse and wrote that Jews in Europe are fleeing to Israel as a safe-heaven. “They don’t realise though that no matter where they are we will fight them until the trees and stones speak and say: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him’,” he wrote on his blog on January 16.

Although the blog has since been taken down, what Bilardi wrote can still be found online.

“By fleeing to Israel, the Jews of Europe are only changing their place of death,” he wrote.

“If they desire safety and security their most viable option is fleeing to the Islamic State and paying jizyah [a tax], thereby making their blood, wealth and property haram [prohibited] for the Muslims.”

Bilardi said that “as a secularist” he had believed that a Jew in Israel was the enemy but a Jew in Europe was innocent “and many others also hold this ignorant opinion”.

However, he claimed that he then read the Talmud and came to the conclusion that all Jews are “filthy and depraved”.

“After I became the ‘radical, terrorist’ I am today though, I woke up to the reality of these pigs and monkeys and accepted that there is nothing between us and them but the sword.”

He said the Islamic State is building an army and “it is only a matter of time before the [Islamic] State makes its move and enters the occupied territory to slaughter the Jews who have oppressed the Muslims of Palestine for 56 years and liberate Jerusalem.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry executive director Peter Wertheim said that insecure and impressionable young men have always been susceptible to indoctrination into cults and extremist ideologies, which appeal to a reductionist mindset that craves simplification and cannot cope adequately with complexity.

“The mindset of a racist is no different. “Anti-Semitism is an integral part of the Islamist ideology which Jake Bilardi swallowed whole.”

He said it can take many years before young minds mature to the point where they realise that the so-called answers they have found are false.

“In the meantime those who have been indoctrinated lose their moral compass and can cause enormous harm, not only to others but ultimately to themselves.

“Jake Bilardi’s short life and squalid death are a tragic example.”

JOSHUA LEVI