POLITICS: How do two privileged New Jersey teens get seduced by ISIS?

Two teenagers from one of New Jersey’s wealthiest suburbs were arrested this week for allegedly plotting to join ISIS and carry out mass killings of Jews.

According to federal prosecutors, Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel and Milo Sedarat, both 19, both from Montclair, had stockpiled weapons, posed with an ISIS flag, and fantasized online about attacks on Jewish communities.

Sedarat, the son of a well-known poet, reportedly said he wanted to “execute 500 Jews” and “mow down” pro-Israel marchers in his hometown.

Jimenez-Guzel — whose mother, Meral Guzel, works at the United Nations Women’s Entrepreneurship Program — posted photos of himself with knives and said he wanted to behead people. 

Both were student athletes at Montclair High School, one of the most elite public schools in the area.

The FBI says the pair were part of a wider network of young men across several countries — at least 13 in total — connected through online radicalization pipelines stretching from the United States to the UK, Sweden and Finland.

It’s a story that seems straight out of a movie: two affluent American teenagers from a picture-perfect town embracing one of the most violent ideologies on earth. 

But it’s not as inexplicable as it looks. 

These boys didn’t grow up amid war or deprivation.

They grew up amid nothingness. 

They had comfort, but not conviction; connection, but not community; access to everything, but belief in nothing.

They are the hollow products of a culture that dismantled every possible avenue through which they could have found meaning.

In the vacuum left by the disappearance of faith, tradition and moral authority, they went looking for something to believe in; something absolute, something that made them feel powerful and alive and part of something bigger than themselves.

And online, there’s an endless marketplace of extremism eager to sell that illusion.

Both the far right and far left feed the same hunger.

Nick Fuentes tells young men that Jews are the problem; Hasan Piker tells them Jews are the oppressors; ISIS tells them Jews are the enemy of God.

It’s all one continuum, rage marketed as purpose.

These boys didn’t find ISIS in a mosque.

They found it on Discord.

Their descent wasn’t religious, it was existential.

The tragedy is that they’re not alone.

A generation raised without faith or moral grounding is now desperately searching for something to fill the void.

And when that search happens in the digital wilderness, without fathers, pastors or teachers to guide them, it leads not to purpose, but to poison.

The Montclair jihadis aren’t just a security threat.

They’re a warning: When a society stops offering its young men meaning, something else will.

And what steps in to fill that emptiness may be worse than anything we dare to imagine.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars and is a homeschooling mother of six in greater Washington, DC.