Parents of alleged NJ terrorist Mohammed Alessa blame the FBI for their kid turning to jihad.

But even at a young age, his parents said their son suffered from the uncontrollable rages that would plague him throughout his teens and fuel run-ins with school officials and law enforcement.

In their first interview together, Mahmood and Nadia Alessa, of North Bergen, detailed their son’s psychological problems, his troubled teen years and their belief that the FBI pushed two innocent young men into a terrorist mold.

“It’s like they’re against these two kids, they want them to be terrorists,” Nadia Alessa said of federal authorities. “These kids [don’t] know what’s going on, they don’t know anything.”

They also said many of the government’s claims against their son are dead wrong and that authorities have mistaken his anger problems and grandiosity for something much more serious.

They said a 2007 trip to Jordan, which the FBI believes was a failed attempt to join the insurgency in Iraq, was a chance for Mohamed Alessa to study abroad. The Alessas also said he was traveling to Egypt on June 5 to meet a 19-year-old Swedish Muslim he planned to marry, not as a way station to jihad in Somalia, as the government alleges.

Right. Their son just has anger problems and delusions of grandeur (that includes repeated statements of jihad) but he’s just misguided and the FBI made them turn to jihad - or misinterpreted their intentions and statements.

Gotcha. Alessa’s parents are in denial that their kid was a ticking time bomb and the FBI caught him before he did something really bad.