How do two privileged New Jersey teens get seduced – Latest News
Two youngsters from one of New Jersey’s wealthiest suburbs have been arrested this week for allegedly plotting to affix ISIS and perform mass killings of Jews.
According to federal prosecutors, Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel and Milo Sedarat, each 19, each from Montclair, had stockpiled weapons, posed with an ISIS flag, and fantasized online about assaults on Jewish communities.
Sedarat, the son of a well-known poet, reportedly stated he wished to “execute 500 Jews” and “mow down” pro-Israel marchers in his hometown.
Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel together with his mom, Meral Guzel. Facebook/Meral Guzel
Jimenez-Guzel — whose mom, Meral Guzel, works on the United Nations Women’s Entrepreneurship Program — posted images of himself with knives and stated he wished to behead people.
Both have been pupil athletes at Montclair High School, one of essentially the most elite public faculties within the space.
The FBI says the pair have been half of a wider community of younger males throughout a number of nations — at the very least 13 in complete — linked via online radicalization pipelines stretching from the United States to the UK, Sweden and Finland.
It’s a story that appears straight out of a film: two prosperous American youngsters from a picture-perfect city embracing one of essentially the most violent ideologies on earth.
But it’s not as inexplicable because it seems.
These boys didn’t grow up amid conflict or deprivation.
They grew up amid nothingness.
They had consolation, however not conviction; connection, however not neighborhood; entry to all the pieces, however perception in nothing.
They are the hole merchandise of a tradition that dismantled each potential avenue via which they might have discovered that means.
Roger Sedarat and Milo Sedarat. Facebook/Janette Afsharian
In the vacuum left by the disappearance of religion, custom and ethical authority, they went on the lookout for one thing to imagine in; one thing absolute, one thing that made them really feel highly effective and alive and half of one thing greater than themselves.
And online, there’s an limitless market of extremism wanting to sell that phantasm.
Both the far proper and much left feed the identical starvation.
Nick Fuentes tells younger males that Jews are the issue; Hasan Piker tells them Jews are the oppressors; ISIS tells them Jews are the enemy of God.
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It’s all one continuum, rage marketed as goal.
These boys didn’t discover ISIS in a mosque.
They discovered it on Discord.
Their descent wasn’t non secular, it was existential.
The tragedy is that they’re not alone.
A era raised with out religion or ethical grounding is now desperately looking for one thing to fill the void.
And when that search occurs within the digital wilderness, with out fathers, pastors or academics to information them, it leads to not goal, however to poison.
The Montclair jihadis aren’t simply a security risk.
They’re a warning: When a society stops offering its younger males that means, one thing else will.
And what steps in to fill that vacancy could also be worse than something we dare to think about.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars and is a homeschooling mom of six in larger Washington, DC.
