Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad Fought the Law, And We All Lost

So apparently some arsehole has shot police-employed IT worker Curtis Cheng in Parramatta.

Pictured: Some Arsehole

First of all, my sympathies to Cheng's family and friends and the fucking awful shit they're going through right now. That's priority one. Sadly, priority two is that this particular arsehole happened to've been of Middle Eastern extraction, and in the current climate that brings complications. Since both the right-wing Islamophobe freakout and the left-wing victim-narrative counter-freakout will be in full swing by now, it might be a good time to post some of what the War Nerd had to say when ISIS darling Jihadi John was revealed to be Mohammed Emwazi of jolly ol' London.

Why, oh why, would a rich boy from a nice home go on to make snuff movies? That’s the whine you hear from the press. As always, first thing to do is question the question; why wouldn’t he? He’s famous, isn’t he? The hero of his own movie, “and the papers want to know whose shirts he wears,” as the feller said. It’s a classic male fantasy, and gore is a classic feature of those fantasies. What astonishes me is that so few middle- and upper-class Muslim kids are succumbing to it.

True, Mr. Emwazi is unlikely to spend his thirtieth birthday aboveground, but that idea probably doesn’t register with him. It usually doesn’t, with young males... – The War Nerd, Why Did Mohammed Emwazi Become Jihadi John? 27 Feb 2015

If you want to know how far removed our officials are from this basic idea, check out what they had to say in the ABC coverage: Commissioner Andrew Scipione said, "We believe his actions were politically motivated and therefore linked to terrorism," while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull denounced it as "cold-blooded murder, targeting the NSW Police Service."

I don't pretend to know everything – or anything, come to think of it, when I don't know the dude or any of his family – but that sounds absurd to me. 15-year-olds don't have politics, and they do nothing cold-bloodedly. At that age we aren't really capable of anything beyond an emotional response. What passes for our minds is focused on exactly one thing – pussy – and when we can't get it (and we usually can't, especially growing up in a conservative religious community), we turn to the next best thing – blood and glory. Emphasis on the blood.

"What's really concerning police is there's no rhyme or reason to these current terror threats," said Pat Gooley, ignoring the tautology that if there's no rhyme or reason to it then it's not fucking terrorism. Terror is about gestures, about undermining the public's sense of safety until the whole world's paranoid and ready for war. 15-year-olds don't think as long-term as that, they just want their gore and want it now. Far from a terrorist, Fuckhead Jabar sounds like a simple loser, a young loser who found a gun after the strain of adjusting to the Western Suburbs, where the language is impenetrable and girls won't talk to him, broke his feeble little brain in half. Maybe, just maybe, he'll turn out to've been indoctrinated by some terror cell laying low in Parramatta, but personally I doubt it – our security people have turned out to be pretty good at tracking and busting actual terror cells. I'm guessing instead Jabar'll turn out to be a very ordinary kid, not that bright and with no obvious axe to grind. And just like Nicholas Teusant of Acampo, another wannabe splatter hero, that ordinariness will be the whole point.

You’ll notice that my friend’s comments keep coming back to how ordinary Nicholas the Jihadi really is: “Guy is playing by every single fucking rule we were taught growing up.” If there’s anything unusual about Nicholas the Wannabe Warrior, it’s that he’s a poor specimen. He needed to look all the way to Syria to find some way to make a “snowflake” of himself. Most find a sanity-saving fiction nearer home – but then most didn’t have to live in a trailer in Acampo. – The War Nerd, Who Exactly Are The Jihadis (And Why Aren't There More Of Them?), 28 Mar 2014

So, how do we deal with "domestic terrorists" like Fuckhead Jabar Khalil Mohammad?

A girlfriend who puts out and a copy of Modern Warfare.