These children, whose numbers reaches 800 or so, have been known to be the most defenceless victims of MKO’s ruthless cult approaches. According to the testimonies of many separated members, the innocent children have been enslaved by the organization and subject to terrible right abuses for the achievement of certain cult interests. They can be enumerated as follows:
Psychological strategies used for justifying people such as the length of organizational sessions, debriefing strategies and mental control, duality of extra and intra relations, humiliating members, cutting emotional relations with relatives, determining the relation of members with others, and their family in particular!nternal controlling system of MKO in contrast with traditional cultist system focuses on some complex and unbelievable dimensions.
After ideological revolution in MKO, leadership was considered as the zenith of the organization that, emphasized in inter-organizational meetings, had to be obeyed blindly and whose superiority could never be questioned. Such a leader is only accountable to God. In other words, he is regarded as the vicegerent of God. Mahdi Abrishamchi describes the position of leader as follows:
Nowadays, there are at least two organization accused of being terrorist and cultist, namely Al-Qa’ede and MKO. In 1997, U.S. foreign ministry introduced MKO as a sect following cultist doctrine. The US State Department’s report refers to the terrorist nature of MKO and their cultist doctrine: Rajavi, who heads the Mojahedin’s political and military wings, has fostered a cult of personality around himself.
..intra-organizational controlling procedures in order to exercise a permanent and all-out mental, emotional and political control over the insiders. It was aimed to break members’ ties of attachment to anything and replace them with an ideological, political and social dependence to Rajavi’s leadership… .
The meeting was unfortunately disrupted by an unusually large number of Mojahedin cult members who had lain in wait at the venue in order to prevent people speaking. Regardless of the implications for freedom of speech in a European country, this kind of disruption has become emblematic of the Mojahedin’s inability to even vaguely disguise its cult nature.
There is no meaningful difference between a cult and a religion in terms of faith, morality or spirituality. The primary differences are that a”cult”operates outside of mainstream society, often calls on its followers to make an absolute commitment to the group and typically has a single leader, whereas a”religion”usually operates within mainstream culture
for those yet in doubt, that MKO preserved the characteristics of both a terrorist group and a cult. Following the classic techniques of cults, Mojahedin relies on psychological manipulation and brainwashing to mesmerize the insiders to follow the orders. Singer and Lalich* define cults as organizations that feature”coordinated programs of coercive influence and behavioral control,”many religiously
No doubt, both in the issue of referendum and the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, Mojahedin were very critical, mostly not of the moves but of the contents. In fact, their dismay was the result of the group’s political and ideological teachings that did not evaluate the two moves coinciding with their strategic ends, that is to say, to escalate a gross military tension with the US.