He reads and watches widely - about Israel's bombing of Gaza, the Vietnam war, drug gangs in Mexico, the early days of Australia's settlement. He scours everything, from books to news sites online to the Sunrise morning television program, seeking out the stories of the oppressed, the victims of colonialism, violence and conquest. He comes to believe their cause is misunderstood or misconstrued in the West, and his sense of social justice is inflamed.

His name is Jake Bilardi. And on Wednesday this week, his burning desire for justice drove this clever young man from a big family in Melbourne's outer suburbs to a grisly martyrdom in Iraq.

This skinny teen fitted none of the stereotypes of Islamic radicalism. He was not brought up by hardline Muslim parents, nor was he an angry criminal, prone to violence. On his own account, he was an "atheist school student in affluent Melbourne".

He was not groomed on shadowy social media sites by a slick indoctrination machine. He used a Victorian government-issue laptop and a copy of the Koran to study Islam, and converted out of a burning desire to right historical wrongs. He went to war with his eyes open, then he volunteered to die.

In the process he entirely repudiated his country and its people. Police have confirmed he stockpiled chemicals in his room and Bilardi's online manifesto, "From Melbourne to Ramadi: My Journey", reveals his backup plan, which he called "Plan B", was to bomb its citizens. In a separate blog post, he captioned a picture of Christmas shoppers in Bourke Street Mall as "the talking pigs of Melbourne, Australia, in their sty".

"No one in their right mind," he wrote, could live in Australia, "a land full of such filth and corruption ... without a craving to let some heads roll".

His father, his five siblings and his aunt still live in Australia. They have refused all requests for interviews, so we can only guess at the devastation of seeing their intelligent young relative repudiate everything they stand for and then commit an act of mass murder in a foreign war zone.

But according to Curtin University radicalisation expert Anne Aly, more families are likely to go through this appalling process, because more idealistic young converts will follow a similar path.

"He's certainly not a one-off. A lot of the conflict in the Middle East is framed very much in terms of injustice - kids being killed, the treatment of Palestinian people and the Israeli aggression in Gaza - so there's a lot of left-leaning young people who attach to that," Professor Aly says.

"In Australia, in the 'burbs, there's not much to have any sense of injustice or feelings of injustice about. So they attach to these global movements."

The suburb where Bilardi lived, and mosques and prayer halls that he frequented during and after his conversion, are in the vast, flat, wind-blown wastelands of Melbourne's northern fringe. Everyone at those mosques denies having a radical ideology. But the sense of Muslim grievance and a mistrust of the Western media is palpable.

Abu Zaid, a committee member at the Hume Islamic Youth Centre in north-suburban Coolaroo, where Bilardi sometimes went to hear lectures, took little prompting to blame "Western propaganda" for the radicalisation of the young.

Negative portrayals of Islam, he said "sparks the curiosity, and that spark is all it takes to develop someone's idea".

Mehmet Erkasap, who worships at another mosque in Meadow Heights once frequented by Jake Bilardi, said he was petrified of the fellow Islamists who might "wash the brain" of his Australian-born son and daughters and convince them to go away to fight. But he was almost equally afraid of Western culture with its payload of easy sex, alcohol and drugs.

It's easy from the vantage of the outer suburbs of any big Australian city to despair at the banality of Western culture. There's certainly nothing so romantic as a grand cause among the speed bumps and shopping malls. In his 4400-word online manifesto, Bilardi dismissed democracy as a sham and referred to celebrity culture as "false reality" used to "distract the people from what is really going on in the world".

Professor Aly says Islamic State's radical offering is broad enough to appeal to a wide variety of discontentments, including Bilardi's preoccupation with victimisation, social justice and the faults of the West.

She likens it to the appeal of the "New Left" movement in the 1960s and '70s which led, among other things, to the Paris student riots of 1968 and the kidnap and brainwashing of heiress Patty Hearst by left-wing student group the Symbionese Liberation Army, in the United States.

"It was about young, Western, privileged people who saw themselves as fighting against the injustices and oppression of other people around the world, not themselves," she said.

"There are a lot of parallels between how the New Left wave attracted people, and the way Islamic State do. It doesn't account for every recruit, but it's one category."

Jake Bilardi's story undercuts the narrative - on which much of the Australian response to Islamic State is based - that recruits are systematically groomed online in the way a paedophile might groom a child.

There is evidence in Bilardi's writing of contact with an Islamic State member online, but it was at the very end of a long process that he had otherwise conducted almost entirely alone. His belated contact served only to switch his allegiance from one radical group in Syria to its rival, he said.

There were strong psychological reasons for Bilardi to attach himself to a larger, common cause. He never mentions her in his extensive online writings, but the death of his mother from cancer when he was a teenager hit him hard, according to his aunt, Connie. The teasing that the skinny, buck-toothed geek endured at school may also have made him crave group approval.

"ISIS fulfils  every single one of his personal identity needs and his social needs," Professor Aly says. "It's an outlet for his sense of justice, an outlet for his desire for revenge on injustice, and it's a group and a framework he can do that in."

Bilardi describes online his reaction the moment he first crossed the Turkish border with Syria and entered the city of Jarabulus: "I felt a joy I had never experienced before, the first time my eyes spotted the banner of tawheed fluttering above the city, everything felt surreal, I was finally in the Khilafah [caliphate]".

As much as you can believe what comes out of the Islamic State propaganda machine, Bilardi was also well received in Ramadi, Iraq, where he waited several months to be deployed this week at the wheel of a bomb-laden white Toyota.

"He was a lovely brother, fantastic manners & great personality. It was an honour knowing someone like him," wrote one person with knowledge of Islamic State news, and going by the name "The Last Tweet".

Neither Australian culture nor Bilardi's ties to his natural family - after his mother died he lived with siblings in a house a neighbour referred to as "derelict" - were strong enough to counter any of these attractions. His family "hated" Islam, he told BBC interviewer Secunder Kermani in December. Asked about the impact on them of the murder-suicide he intended to commit, he off-handedly replied: "I've got a job to do. I didn't come here to hand out roses and boxes of chocolates".

In the Muslim community, whose young people are most vulnerable to the siren call of Islamic terrorism, and in the wider society, we are increasingly uneasy about the threats to our security posed by Islamic State.

The possibility of lone-wolf attacks at home, the recruitment of an ordinary boy like Jake Bilardi, and the scenes of blood, beheadings and horror from abroad run chills through us.

However, listening to our gut response to this threat, according to ANU counter-radicalisation expert Dr Clarke Jones, could make things worse.

He's interviewed terrorists in Australian prisons, Guantanamo Bay and within Asia. Like Bilardi, many said they were originally motivated by the plight of downtrodden Muslims around the world at the hands of Western military intervention. Some see Islamic State as the only answer to restoring Muslim pride and human rights: fighting violence with violence.

"The more we're shocked by what we see the more we'll support government military intervention. So we'll go through this cycle of intervention and more recruitment," Jones says, until what Islamic State sees as the inevitable conclusion where "everything outside [the caliphate] will be utter chaos".

The snide comments by Tony Abbott that "more Muslims" should describe Islam as a religion of peace "and mean it" feeds directly into the broader narrative of grievance. If Mel and Kochie's coverage of 9/11 on the Sunrise program was enough to trigger Jake Bilardi's sense of justice, comments like that from the Prime Minister are ill advised.

Both Abu Zaid at the Hume Islamic Youth Centre and Jones agree that the Western media is partly to blame. We are "playing into the hands" of the radicals by showing desensitising images of violence, and by failing to question Australia's military intervention in Iraq, Jones says.

A better response from government would be to tailor programs to individual needs: to change the mindset of those already radicalised inside prisons or returning from Syria and Iraq, and to perform "community interventions" on people like Bilardi who are taking a dangerous path in the comfort of their own bedrooms.

Bilardi's detailed manifesto and his grisly death have, if nothing else, spelled out in detail how a scared little boy from the suburbs can voluntarily join the "death cult" that's terrifying us all. If that's his only legacy, it's a useful one, because "without a doubt," he will not be the last of his kind that we see, Jones says.

"I don't want to sound alarmist, but I think we're going to see more attempts at lone acts of terrorism in Australia, more people leaving ... and more returning to Australia and ending up in correctional facilities.

"I think we're in for a busy year - a busy few years."