Protest Gathering of over 30 MKO hostages’ families at Camp Liberty Gates – January 2016
Their only demand is to have the right to visit their loved ones. They ask human rights bodies :” why is it that 12 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein (the benefactor of fugitive terrorist leader Massoud Rajavi), there is still no sign that the terrorists’ camp will close and the residents held hostage by the MEK leaders will be rescued and taken to safety.”
Terrified people who are restricted in a cult-like system do not want to be free, they want to be protected. Cult leaders keep people in the state of terror so they cannot think of freedom, even they may give their freedom to the cult leaders willingly. They won’t realize the necessity of freedom unless they are aided from the outside world.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO/the Cult of Rajavi) is a destructive cult according to the criteria suggested by the prominent cult expert, Margaret Thaler Singer.
The first criterion comes from the group’s use of a specific set of mind control tactics. The MKO leaders use various tactics to brainwash their rank and file. Members are forced to report their thoughts and their dreams. They have to attend daily self-criticism meetings where they are under severe peer pressure. They are totally barred from family and friends.
A destructive cult is an authoritarian in its power structure. Although the Rajavis chant slogans of democracy and freedom, they keep their followers under a restrict totalitarian hierarchy. Everyone in the cult of Rajavi supervised by his superior comrades. Celibacy is obligatory. Forced labor is scheduled for all members. Protesting against the system or the leaders results in solitary confinement, torture or even death.
However, the charismatic, determined, and dominating portrait that the leaders show keeps the focus of love, devotion and allegiance on them. That’s why after the arrest of Rajavi by the French Police in June 2003, several members of the cult set themselves on fire.
Thus, it is absolutely vital to help and facilitate the release of the members who are still taken as hostages in the Cult of Rajavi. Most of the group members will eventually walk away from the totalitarian system, but this may take place after decades of exploitation and personality destruction. So-, it is vitally important to stop the cult-like dominance of the Rajavis.
Today, families of the MKO members try their best to help their children leave the cult system. They travel to Baghdad, Iraq to urge the authorities of Camp Liberty to have contact with their loved ones. They write letters to international human rights bodies. They visit certain officials who are in charge of the group’s relocation from Iraq. However, the authorities of the Cult of Rajavi obstruct all efforts made by the families who want to express their unconditional love to their loved ones in the cult. The authorities of the UNHCR should work to make the least rupture in the tall walls of the Rajavi- made castle. They should cooperate with the families to help their children liberate themselves from the bars of Rajavi’s prison, otherwise there is no end for the tragedy of lost lives of abused individuals.
By Mazda Parsi
Over the past decades, much of the attention of the world have been focused on the radical extremist groups such as AlQaeda and ISIS. But the true threat actually comes from the cult-like structure of these groups. Cult-like controlling system and the indoctrination methodology of these groups finally results in the most horrible acts of violence.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO/MEK) is characterized as one of these destructive cults that threat the world’s security. Elizabeth Rubin the prominent journalist of the New York Times, was first to call the MKO, “the Cult of Rajavi”. The phrase was based on her first-hand experience of visiting the group’s base in Iraq, Camp Ashraf. About the world she witnessed in the MKO camp, she wrote:
“When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks, busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. “[1]
As Rubin asserts, members of the Cult of Rajavi transformed from “human beings to acolytes of Rajavi “. But what the leaders of the cult want to show off is entirely different from what they really are. Jeremiah Goulka is one of the authors of the RAND Corporation report on the Mujahedin Khalq. He criticizes the US high profiles who support the group and finally removed it from the list of terrorist organization. ”Accidentally or not, though, the speakers were helping to raise the profile and legitimize the aims of a cult group that will not bring democracy to Iran and has no popular support in the country,” he warned. [2]
The group will not bring democracy because it has not practiced democracy in its four-decade history. “After my visit, I met and spoke to men and women who had escaped from the group’s clutches,” Rubin writes. “Many had to be deprogrammed. They recounted how people were locked up if they disagreed with the leadership or tried to escape; some were even killed.” [3]
“Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden. From the time they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and thoughts.” [4]
Rubin also refers to RAND report, “ A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of the group’s members there might have been held against their will. “ [5]
Regarding the cult-like terrorist substance of the MKO, its leaders’ efforts to pretend the group as a democratic alternative to the Islamic republic is ridiculous. The so-called president elect of the group starts her fabrications in an article raising the issue of the “radical factions” who shake “the world with their ability to convince ordinary people to commit unspeakable atrocities.”
As leaders of a cult, Massoud Rajavi and his wife definitely know how “to convince ordinary people to commit unspeakable atrocities”. The “acolytes” of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, committed numerous acts of violence including military operations, mortar attacks, suicide attacks and assassinations. One significant example of the MKO’s “unspeakable atrocities” was the suppression of Kurdish uprising in Iraq. Read Rubin’s account of the story: “In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds.
“Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Many followers escaped in disgust.” [6]
Today, with the increasing growth of defection from the MKO and the decline of the group following the relocation of its rank and file from Iraq to Europe, the group leaders make efforts to hook their survival to the West. In their masquerades to boast a democratic portrait, Rajavi introduces her cult as “moderate Muslim” that is suppressed by the Islamic Republic.
Presenting a solution to the trouble of the region, she tries to pass her cult off as “an interpretation of genuine Islam that is both democratic and tolerant” that should be accompanied with “military campaigns and intelligence operations in the region”.
Jeremiah Goulka correctly suggests that the MKO’s real aim is “to have the United States install the MEK as Iran’s new government”. He warns, “That would mean war. The MEK may deny wanting violent regime change, but the only conceivable way it could become the next government in Tehran would be at the head of a U.S. invasion force.”[7]
Goulka advises the American supporters of the MKO, “Aligning ourselves with the MEK would undermine any attempt at credibility among Iranians because it would make us look like dupes.” [8] He is absolutely right but looking like “dupes” is the least danger that a community in which the MKO followers are living is posed to.
Brainwashed members of the Cult of Rajavi have several times showed their ability to commit “unspeakable atrocities”. A dozen of them set themselves on fire to protest the arrest of their leader by the French Police, in June 2003. Two female members of the cult lost their life because of self-immolation.
The Rajavis are definitely professional on the most effective methods to turn ordinary people into devotees who commit appalling violence.
By Mazda Parsi
Sources:
[1] RUBIN, ELIZABETH, An Iranian Cult and Its American Friends, The New York Times, August 13, 2011
[2] Goulka, Jeremiah, The Cult of MEK, The American Prospect, July 18, 2012
[3] RUBIN, ELIZABETH, An Iranian Cult and Its American Friends, The New York Times, August 13, 2011
[4] ibid
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] Goulka, Jeremiah, The Cult of MEK, The American Prospect, July 18, 2012
[8]ibid
Shocking revelations about Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan and his female victims in a suburb of London shone a light on the normally hidden phenomenon of cultic abuse which pervades society. The danger now will be that this is treated as just another sensational story before being placed on a journalistic ‘bizarre incident’ list along with Jonestown, Wako and Heaven’s Gate, as a freak occurrence.
Sadly, practitioners in the field of cult awareness know of thousands of lonely families suffering the loss of loved ones to cultic abuse with little recourse to help or even acknowledgement.
As a former member of the political cult Mojahedin Khalq, I am intimately familiar with the methods which Balakrishnan used to control and exploit his victims. As this case has highlighted, for a person caught up in cultic abuse there is no exit, they are in fact modern slaves. Indeed, the 2005 report on the MEK by Human Rights Watch was named ‘No Exit’.
If the experience of the daughter and the other victims in the Balakrishnan case are to teach us anything, it is that this is more common than we’d like to believe and that such ghastly behaviour – much like child abuse – thrives on secrecy and collusion; that is, the unwillingness of successive governments to acknowledge this as a widespread problem. More than anything we need to explode the myth that cults are about religion. They are not. The illusion that ‘new religious movements’ are relatively harmless belongs thirty years in the past. But for years, families and former cult members have been dismissed, even denigrated, as hysterical, malicious or delusional or have been exploited for entertainment by the media. No wonder they are reluctant to speak out.
Even when families do bravely confront the cults which have enslaved their loved ones, they find themselves battling litigation, intimidation and disbelief.
Government failure to engage with this phenomenon has left the public unprotected. While civil law protects a designated group of vulnerable people from undue influence, cult experts argue that anyone can be susceptible to deceptive cult recruitment at some point in their lives; people are usually in a state of transitioning when they get involved in cults. This emphasis on susceptibility not vulnerability is an important distinction because it places culpability directly on the intention and activities of the perpetrator rather than looking for deficiencies in the victims. The Balakrishnan cult case is unusual because the leader was prosecuted, not just because the victims were rescued.
Interestingly, techniques for deceptive psychological manipulation are already acknowledged and understood in various modern contexts where coercive persuasion is used for cynical exploitation and enslavement. These include partner abuse, grooming for sex, spiritual abuse, abusive therapy, extremist violence and terrorism. All these are regarded as morally repugnant. But as yet we lack a law which covers the activity which underlies them all.
In the modern vernacular, the term brainwashing is used by ordinary people exactly to describe an unaccountable change of mind and/or personality in an otherwise normal person. Bewildered families of young people travelling to Syria say their children have been brainwashed. The government needs to catch up with scientific and social understanding of this phenomenon if we are to be protected. Are MPs aware, for example, not whether, but how many fully brainwashed cult members are working in sensitive national security roles? We know they exist because as cult counsellors we talk with their families. Yet the phenomenon is glossed over as almost immaterial.
Cultic abuse – known in the vernacular as brainwashing – has a very precise definition. It is not about ‘using advertising to brainwash us into buying things’ or ‘brainwashing us into becoming docile citizens under government dictates’. These are false and unhelpful myths. Neuropsychology explains that ‘changing your mind’ is a physical experience which can be scientifically identified. Brainwashing is not about doctrine, it is about the psychologically manipulative techniques used to literally ‘change’ our minds.
In more legalistic terms it is ‘the deliberate and systematic application of an array of recognised techniques for psychological manipulation without the knowledge or informed consent of the victim in order to effect a breach of a person’s mental, emotional, intellectual and social integrity for the purposes of abuse, exploitation, slavery and/or pecuniary gain, and to so inhibit their critical faculties that they do not recognise their own predicament so that they may act in ways harmful to their best interests and the interests of society on instruction or by command or by neglect.
The advantage of criminalising cultic abuse in this way is that it is ideologically neutral and does not reflect any particular belief system but straightforwardly describes harmful behaviour. This would protect all our citizens and an obvious place would be an amendment to the new Modern Slavery Bill passed in March.
Prime Minister David Cameron has already uttered the word brainwashing in speeches about Radicalisation. There was no public outcry or panic. Ordinary people know what he means. What a law would do is to give a precise definition which would allow us to ‘join the dots’ between seemingly disparate events like the Balakrishnan cult, the Rotherham grooming for sex scandal and terrorist recruitment.
Indeed, public apprehension over the war on terrorism in Syria and the perceived threat of blowback, is the perfect opportunity for the government to introduce and explain the phenomenon of brainwashing in this narrowly defined sense as an element of the Prevent Strategy. The introduction of a criminal offence which allows the detection, prosecution and punishment of this abhorrent behaviour will aid public understanding and allay fears.
Anne Khodabandeh @AnneKhodabandeh
Anne Khodabandeh, a leading authority on cultic abuse and terrorism, works as a consultant within the remit of the UK Prevent Duty. After twenty years in the MEK, a dangerous, destructive mind control cult, she helps families through Iran-Interlink.
Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton), Iranian.com,
One sure sign of someone being involved in a cult is that there is a clear separation from family and friends. This sign is clearly observed in the Cult of Rajavi (The Mujahedin khalq Organization/ the MKO). There are numerous cases of families of the group members residing in Camp Liberty Iraq who have been striving to visit their loved ones in the camp but they are absolutely barred by the authorities to do so and they are labeled the group authorities who forbid any kind of family relationship, label the families as “agents of the regime’s intelligence Ministry under the cover of families of the residents”. However, the 
efforts of the suffering families picketing in front of Camp Liberty resulted favorably by the Iraqi Parliament.
Following the meeting between Liberty residents’ families and certain Iraqi MPs, a parliamentary committee was formed to investigate the situation of the MKO members and their families’ request to visit their loved ones in the camp. They are hoping that the Iraqi administration will take proper actions to facilitate their visit. The parliament website reported that a member of the parliament’s leadership board, Dr. Humam Hamoudi had recommended the Human Rights Commission and Foreign Relations Commission to form a delegation to visit Camp Liberty in order to get first-hand information about the situation in the camp. This will help them to transfer the family’s wishes to their loved ones about their desires to visit them in the camp.
On the other side of the battle, the MKO’s propaganda does not remain silent. It publishes a so-called letter of families of liberty residents to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. In the alleged letter, the alleged “liberty residents’ families residing in Europe and the United States” are “gravely concerned” about the lives of their children!
The so-called letter is a failed tactic because of the numerous evidences on violation of the rights of family in the MKO camps. Regardless of the grieves of a large number of families from Iran who have been endeavoring to visit their beloveds in Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty, the truths on the family rights abuse inside the MKO is undeniable.
Despite the MKO propaganda calls for visa for families in Europe and the US, there are families who were granted visa to travel to Iraq but they were prevented from visiting their loved ones in the Camps. Mustafa and Mahboubeh Mohammadi, whose daughter Somayeh has been taken as hostage by the MKO leaders, went to Camp Ashraf Iraq several times. They were not allowed to visit their daughter and even they were beaten by the MKO agents. However, the Mohammadis did not stop their efforts to save their daughter from the cult bars of the MKO.
Mustafa Mohammadi together with his other daughter Hurieh even went to the MKO’s headquarters in Auver sur d’oise to urge the group leaders to release their long lost daughter. Once more, they were attacked by the group agents for seeking their most basic right, the right to have a free contact with their loved one. Mostafa and Hurrieh were accompanied by another heartbroken father, Ghorban Ali Hosseinnezhad. When Gorban Ali escaped Camp Ashraf his daughter was left behind in the camp.
According to his testimonies, when he was in the camp he was not allowed to visit his daughter regularly. “The leaders of the MKO cult did not allow me and my first daughter Zeinab, 34, to visit and talk to each other while we were both in the same camp,” said Hosseinnezhad. “We were just allowed to meet each other on the New Year’s celebration for an hour or two and under their direct control and supervision.”
In Hurriyeh Mohammadi’s report on their trip to Auver sur D’oise you can read: “The Mojahedin are threatened by a father and daughter that have put their lives on hold many times and have used the little resources they have to fly to Paris to ask for the safety of Somayeh. They call themselves an organization for the liberation of the people of Iran yet they cannot even provide freedom to the ones they call their own. We will not stop fighting for the safety of our children and this will not be over until these captives are freed.”
As usual, the MKO propaganda labels the two fathers as agents of the Iranian Intelligence but there are many more evidences on the cases of violation against families in the group. Forced divorces and separation of children from parents are two iconic examples of abuses took place in the MKO after the so-called ideological revolution of Massoud Rajavi. Human Rights Watch and the US Defence Department’s RAND report, both mentioned the fact.
In Persian references you can see testimonies of former members who reveal horrible evidences about child abuses committed in the MKO camps. Manijeh Habashi and Nadereh Afshari, Batoul Soltani and many others are female defectors of the Cult of Rajavi who recount horrific facts about distorted family relations in the MKO camps. Before the children were dispatched to Europe in 1991, mothers in Ashraf were not permitted to live with their children. They were just allowed to visit their children on certain days of the week or certain hours of the day.
The above mentioned cases of violation of family rights occur in the camps of the MKO where no visa is needed to travel to visit a family member and the distance between two family members is not more than a few kilometer.
In a letter to UNHCR, former members of the MKO including Ghorban Ali Hosseinnejad ask the authorities to provide residents of Camp liberty with a situation so that they can decide for their future with their free will. “Many of us have been in this organization, before being able to find a way out of it, for decades”, they state.” We are fully aware of the brainwashing and intimidation activities that take place at every level with the single aim of isolating the members from the outside world and feeding them false information and targeted propaganda to turn them against their own families.”
The signatories of the letter believe that family connections –that the MKO members have been deprived of for many years—are a key to release them mentally and eventually physically. “Based on our personal experience, we assure you that if you facilitate the meeting of the members with their families in a protected and private space, without the presence of their superiors, they will find the courage to express their true desire that is to join their families and relocate from Iraq,” they write.
While the MKO propaganda claims that Iraqi government does not grant visas to families of liberty residents, this is the call of families who repeatedly went to Iraq, stand behind the gates of Ashraf and Liberty but they were not granted “visa” to visit their loves ones who are taken as hostages behind the bars of the camp:
“We will go to any lengths and are begging anyone who can hear our voices to help us. Please help free our kids from their evil clutches. Help their voices be heard. Help mothers take their children back into their arms. Help children see the advancement of the world and live the rest of their lives not in fear but tranquility and peace.
By Mazda Parsi
Knowingly or unknowingly, we may be supporting and promoting groups like Daesh instead of crippling and destroying them
In the fight against terrorist groups or cults, we should take care not to promote them in any way or to make it easier for them to recruit. Our first line of defense should be to understand their strengths and weaknesses, in order to match their strengths and attack their vulnerabilities.
There are three Hs that matter most in people’s lives: health (of body and soul), honor and happiness. Destructive and terrorist cults are masters of deception, with their black-and-white worldview. They appear to be offering a simple, strict and easily understood definition of these three concepts to their followers.
A cult’s definition of the three Hs will infiltrate deep into the mind and soul of its followers and stay deep in their unconscious, even years after they leave the group. The promise of these three Hs can be very attractive, 
especially to young people, and this ability to convince and deceive is the cult’s main strength, and one that should worry us most.
Honor
The formula for defining honor in most cults, especially those that may be called destructive or terrorist groups, is very simple: love/worship/praise (X) and hate/resist/fight (Y). The only thing that is needed to make this formula complete is to replace X and Y with a popular idea, which can later be defined and elaborated by the cult leader.
For example, all “religious” cults, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Moonies, al-Qaeda, Daesh (Islamic State) and Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MeK), will substitute X with God/Christ/Islam and Y with the Devil/Satan/the anti-Christ/enemies of Islam. Political or nonreligious cults might replace God with the people/freedom/democracy and the devil with imperialism or dictatorship.
In order to recruit young Muslims, al-Qaeda, Daesh and MeK claim that their ideology is Islam and that they are fighting the enemies of the religion. They have all exploited two important Islamic concepts, jihad (struggle) and shahada (giving witness), and have developed a doctrine around these ideas by giving them twisted, wrong definitions.
Jihad (greater and lesser struggle), according to the majority of Muslim jurists (except the Wahhabi and Salafi), is defined as a struggle against wrongs in the mind and behavior of a Muslim or in a Muslim community (greater jihad), or defending a Muslim community against aggression by enemies (lesser jihad). Both greater and lesser jihad have many rules and conditions set in the Quran and hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad).
Shahada (giving witness or martyrdom) also has a very clear definition throughout all the different sects of Islam, but terrorist cults have given a new distorted meaning to both notions, changing them into “killing” and “dying,” even by suicide bombing. MeK, al-Qaeda and Daesh have violated all the norms and rules of jihad and shahada through acts of terrorism, such as killing of unarmed civilians, women, children and the elderly, and bombing places of worship.
However wrong or distorted and anti-Islamic their definition in the view of most Muslims, they have given a new meaning to the word honor, namely fighting and dying for the cause of the group and the desires of the leader. Of course, it is easy to show that what they do has nothing to do with Islam, jihad or shahada, but when the cult has manipulated a person’s mind, from then on he or she is utterly reliant on the leader for understanding the doctrine of the cult and the meaning of honor.
What they replace those dots with is not as important as how they define them. For example, in MeK, along with the fluctuating whims and interests of its leader—Masoud Rajavi—how to love and worship God and resist and fight those who oppose them has changed many times. “God” has been substituted or supplemented by “the people,” “independence,” “freedom” or “human rights”; and the “devil” has become “exploitation,” “imperialism,” “Zionism” or “dictatorship.”
At the same time, Rajavi has been able to define these ideas as he wishes. For example, he has defined people and love for the people in such a way as to justify support for international sanctions against Iran. He has defined honor as a fight for the independence of Iran and opposition to imperialism, while at the same time ordering his followers to join Iraq in fighting Iran during the Iraq-Iran war. And now he is encouraging warmongering, right-wing Americans to attack Iran and ruin the country, as they did in Iraq.
MeK’s definition of freedom rests on the notion that a person permanently suppresses his or her individuality, desires nothing personal, abandons family life and accepts celibacy. According to this definition of freedom, followers feel they are the freest people on earth, overlooking the fact that with this definition its subjects have no individual desire, ambition or want. These days, MeK defines honor for its followers simply as love, loyalty and obedience toward the Rajavis (husband and wife, the leaders of the group) and hatred toward the Iranian regime, which the Rajavis wish to overthrow in order to become the next leaders of the Iranian people.
This definition of honor sticks to the mind and mentality of followers and will direct and justify all their thoughts, feelings and behaviors even years after leaving the cult. Recently, I overheard about some ex-members of MeK insulting other former members, calling them traitors or mercenaries in the employ of the enemy, because they had abandoned the “honorable goals” planted in their minds when they were part of the cult. Years after leaving the group, the name-callers still feel they are honorable because of their “struggle” within the group.
I noticed the same kind of argument being proffered by some ex-followers of other cults, claiming that the doctrine and goals of the groups were sound and only the leadership was wrong, and that they were going to stick to that doctrine. What they fail to realize is that these “goals, “honor” and “doctrine” are, in this context, nothing more than words without any substance. Whatever the words used—freedom, imperialism, justice—ex-members of a cult should know that they simply reflect the leader’s interests.
It is very difficult for ex-members, who have made great sacrifices and paid an enormous price for being in the cult, to reject the concepts of the doctrine or the honor that they have learned within the cult, and instead seek new principles to live by. Unless they succeed in finding a better meaning of honor, they are condemned to be unhappy and, in many cases, to remain a follower at heart, without knowing how or why.
Health
Health (physical, psychological and emotional) is another prerequisite for a happy life. Again, in destructive cults there is a very clear and strict, unequivocal definition of health. Physical health is important as long as one is struggling to pursue the cult’s goals, but it can and should be sacrificed as a mark of honor when needed.
In destructive cults, followers do not need to think about their physical health (including their essential needs such as food and shelter), as the group acts as a kind of insurance, guaranteeing them the fulfilment of all their physical needs and lifelong care. They achieve this by, first, drastically reducing each person’s personal expectations about his or her physical needs, and, second, by channeling the resources of the cult toward specific needs when necessary.
In addition, cults, by rejecting individuality, which they describe as the ugliness of selfishness, dramatically reduce the psychological needs of individuals, offering them a collective life, comradeship and brotherhood/sisterhood, common goals and the security of the cult’s character.
Cults deal with the emotional health or needs of their followers by labeling outsiders as the enemy and dehumanizing them, thus psychologically isolating their followers from the outside world and their familiar social milieu, and neutralizing any feelings they may have for their loved ones. At the same time, the cult portrays itself as a family, cult leaders as parents and other cult members as friends/comrades or siblings, thereby creating a new set of feelings and emotions among the followers, which can easily be directed, controlled and satisfied by the leader.
Cults also instill a new set of beliefs in their followers about their sexual needs, which can be met by free sex, arranged marriages or sex without emotion and family ties, or denied by eliminating sex from their lives altogether.
Happiness
Destructive cults, by rejecting all the social and family responsibilities and expectations of their followers and their individual needs and desires, claim to provide the health component of happiness. More importantly, by creating a strong belief system and a clear, simple and achievable definition of honor and being honorable, they promise their followers an illusion of happiness, which seems satisfactory, although to outsiders it seems strange, wrong and unacceptable. This capacity to delude their followers is one of the great strengths of destructive and terrorist cults that enable them to recruit and hold on to their followers.
Most of us would, of course, argue that this kind of happiness is a sham, an illusion, and is only achievable via some sort of mind manipulation or brainwashing. But the reality is that it can be and has been achieved within cults, and we have yet to find an answer or antidote for it.
For us in the West especially, it is very difficult to imbue young people with a sense of the three Hs, particularly honor, given that all three Hs have been commercialized and given ambiguous and sometimes unachievable meanings. The mass media and advertising give young people the impression that, to feel good, proud and honorable, they have to be rich, famous, good looking, with fit and beautifully proportioned bodies and, perhaps, endowed with immense artistic or scientific talent. It is almost impossible to define honor for an ordinary individual by reference to an idea such as nationalism or a belief in a religion or philosophy, without pushing them toward becoming racist, dogmatist or superstitious. For other meaningful, achievable and admirable values, such as caring for nature and humanity or standing up against exploitation, there is a lack of teaching and incentives in our families, schools and the media.
With respect to health, again, the monopolization of its meaning by the mass media and its exploitation by the dollar is, to say the least, unfortunate. Similarly, happiness for our younger generation tends nowadays to mean joy, fun and lust.
Promoting Cults Instead of Destroying Them
In defining the three Hs, we in the West are, therefore, at our weakest, while destructive and terrorist cults are at their strongest. In this situation, the worst thing that we might do is to attack them from this angle.
This is why I believe that those who direct their attacks to the ideology of destructive cults—often by blaming Islam and portraying Islam and Muslims as the root causes of terrorism—are promoting and supporting these cults and, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitating recruitment to them.
I am not referring to groups that are themselves cults in some form and that feed on hate. For them, the existence of other destructive or terrorist groups gives them ammunition with which to promote their own philosophy and agenda and to recruit. Rather, I am referring to our governments, our police, our old and established media and even those who claim to be fighting cults and terrorism. They too, in some cases, by calling these groups Muslim or jihadist and by attacking their doctrine, knowingly or unknowingly support and promote them instead of crippling and ultimately destroying them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
One sure sign of someone being involved in a cult is that there is a clear separation from family, friends and society. Common point between all former members of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the Cult of Rajavi) is that they had lost their family contacts during their membership in the MKO.
Separation from family is the main factor that helps recruiters recruit people to join the cults. Dounia Bouzar, a 51-year-old Muslim anthropologist, who speaks to Reuters during an interview in Paris, France, believes that when a person is recruited by an extremist cult, he thinks that he is chosen. Ms. Bouzar who failed to convince young recruited Islamic militants to leave the cult by religious arguments believes in this idea: “Don’t try to reason with people”. [1]
Bouzar, a Muslim herself, instead uses memories, music and even smells to try to win young militants back. Recruiters have adopted techniques developed by cults, she says, so it takes different skills to break their hold. [2]
Bouzar’s effective technique to get cult victims back to family, has been testified by a large number of former members of the cult of Rajavi. Dr. Massoud Banisadr is a defector of the group who has authored a book called “Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel” about his experience in the organization. He now focuses much of his work on the research and understanding of cults, terrorism, and cult behavior within those structures. Dr. Banisadr was interviewed on his account of living in the Cult of Rajavi by Richard Potter of the mondoweiss.net in, 2013. In the interview he describes how he was manipulated by the cult leaders to leave his wife and his children. He also tells the horrific story of a group of adolescents who were taken to Iraq by the MKO in order to take part in the so-called Eternal Light Operation –a blind operation commanded by massoud Rajavi to take over Tehran across Iraqi borders in three days! [3]
Dr. Masoud Banisadr recounts:
“It was very horrible. There were 15 students who were from the United States, they were supporters. They were brought to Iraq and in the same night they were moved to the battle field. Because of my political rank I was a commander even though I had no military background. I didn’t know anything about fighting. Only a few days before for the first time I saw a machine gun, and I only shot it once. So in the first battle I almost lost my life, I was shot and went unconscious and was taken back to the hospital. Unfortunately I learned all 15 died because they didn’t have any training, and because it was done so quickly no one asked them their names and nothing was recorded. I didn’t even know their names. It was horrible.” [4]
Dounya Bouzar has studied the recruitment process by examining phones and computers of hundreds of French adolescents, and heard it described by the young people and their families who have come to her for help. "Recruiters show differing utopias to young people," she said. "It’s by listening to how they get caught that we can undo the deception." [5]
What happened to Dr. Banisadr was the kind of technique that was presented by the anthropologist. That was family ties, her daughter and other belongings revived the sense of life in his heart. To answer how he was dissociated with the MKO he tells Richard Potter:
“In 1996 Maryam Rajavi (Wife of Massoud Rajavi and current head of MEK) was speaking in London and they asked me to come and mobilize supporters, and talk to British politicians and arrange meetings for Mrs. Rajavi, including Margaret Thatcher. So in London after five or six years I met my daughter. Before that she was 13 and now she was 18. I was faced with a lady. Emotions and feelings are very important in destructive cults. They isolate you from your loved ones, so you don’t turn your emotions to your loved ones. In London I could see my daughter and my sister and my old friends. From early morning to midnight I had to see old friends, ex-supporters of MEK, and answering thousands of questions which internally I had no rational answer for any of them. So these things, my feelings between my friends and family helped me change. And also luck. I had an accident and back problems, and I was so active in London that I had to go to the hospital. My back gave out. Fortunately for me MEK was very busy then for Maryam Rajavi with different meetings, so they didn’t care about me. If it was another juncture they’d make sure someone was with me, because MEK never leaves a member without a chaperone, always at least two with each other they watch and look after each other. So in the hospital I was alone for the almost a month and I could see normal relationships of people with each other. HUMANITY There was a guy beside who had an accident and I was helping him to shave his beard, or to feed him and so on, and this revived my individuality and my humanity and self-confidence. All gradually it came back. When it came that I left the hospital I left MEK. I didn’t reject them fully yet, but I realized I couldn’t be with them anymore.” [6]
Bouzar has also borrowed an idea from French writer Marcel Proust, who wrote a masterpiece on memory which said how the flavor of a certain sponge cake – a Madeleine – revived an intense experience from his childhood. [7]
As she suggests families using emotional cues – music, pictures, places, scents, food – to "wake up" their loved ones caught in the cults, one may find out why the leaders of the MKO are so dreadfully scared of presence of families in front of the gates of their camps.
The propaganda of the MKO tries to demonize the families labeling them as “agents of the Iranian intelligence ministry”. The group leaders even indoctrinated members to turn against their families. In several cases, children were shown on the MKO TV channel verbally abusing their parents accusing them of working for the “regime”.Ghorban Ali Hosseinnezhad and Mostafa Mohammadi fathers of two girls who are taken as hostages at Camp Liberty were even beaten by henchmen of the Cult after they took an action to denounce the group’s abusive attitude in front of Maryam Rajavi’s headquarters in Ouver sur Oise, Paris. [8]
“Touched by memories of his childhood," as Ms. Bouzar said or having heard the voice of their parents and siblings through loudspeakers at Camp Ashraf was so moving to stimulate a large group of the MKO members to escape the cult-like bars of the group. And, that’s the bitter experience Rajavi fears the recurrence.
By Mazda Parsi
References:
[1]MEVEL, PAULINE& LABBÉ, CHINE , ditch reason, Dounia Bouzar, a 51-year-old Muslim anthropologist, speaks to Reuters during an interview in Paris, France, REUTERS, October 22, 2015.
[2] ibid
[3] Potter, Richard, The Cult in the Shadow War: An Interview with a former member of Mojahedin-e-Khalq, mondoweiss.net, November 26, 2013
[4] ibid
[5] MEVEL, PAULINE& LABBÉ, CHINE , ditch reason, Dounia Bouzar, a 51-year-old Muslim anthropologist, speaks to Reuters during an interview in Paris, France, REUTERS, October 22, 2015.
[6]Potter, Richard, The Cult in the Shadow War: An Interview with a former member of Mojahedin-e-Khalq, mondoweiss.net, November 26, 2013
[7] MEVEL, PAULINE& LABBÉ, CHINE , ditch reason, Dounia Bouzar, a 51-year-old Muslim anthropologist, speaks to Reuters during an interview in Paris, France, REUTERS, October 22, 2015.
[8] https://www.nejatngo.org/en/posts/6160
The world is waking up to the fact that some kind of brainwashing is involved in the ISIS campaign to recruit and deploy fighters in Iraq and Syria. This even extends to importing thousands of brainwashed ‘family’ recruits to populate its declared Caliphate.
As an expert on this subject, I was interviewed by Dutch writer and journalist Judit Neurink as part of her new book ‘The war of ISIS: On the road to the Caliphate’.
Judit has lived and worked in Iraqi Kurdistan for nearly a decade. This is important because she has been able to get into the hearts and minds of the people she shares this life with and they have rewarded her with a unique and intimate understanding of this region. This book is a reflection of that.
The book sets out to answer the questions which we all have about ISIS. “Who they are, how did they get their ideals, how do they operate and are they really as dangerous as they would like the world to believe?”
Avoiding any sensationalism, Judit intersperses hard facts, information and analysis with individual accounts and sharp descriptions. She allows other people to speak about their knowledge and experience and by doing so brings the ISIS phenomenon to life in a way no external observer can hope to do.
My contribution has been to talk about the cultic nature of ISIS and the specific methodology it uses to deceive and brainwash its victims into becoming killers and suicide bombers. In this respect it is very similar to the Mojahedin Khalq.
The external behaviour of such groups can sometimes lead people to the false conclusion that one is worse or better than the other. The truth is that because of their internal cult dynamic all terrorist groups are not only dangerous to their intended targets but are also destructive of their own members. Like ISIS, the MEK has killed and tortured thousands of its own members over the years.
Excerpt:
ISIS is much more than just an Islamic group that has established its own state. It is a sect which brainwashes and indoctrinates its members. All new members must first follow lessons in sharia, the Islamic Legislation. “Not in the principles of Islam, but those from the Islamic state”, a young man who left ISIS tells the BBC.
“They teach you the Islam that they want”
Whoever enters ISIS start with forty days in a religious training camp, led by a charismatic trainer. The young man said that his had come from Saudi Arabia, and was so “nice and convincing” that he was “prepared to become a suicide bomber if he has asked”. The training “aims at your heart and not your head, so that your heart becomes filled with passion for their words”.
According to Massoud Khodabandeh, who for years was in the leadership of the Iranian political sect Mujahedeen Khalq (MKO), charismatic trainers play a far more prominent role than the ideology. That is secondary to the goal of the sect, which usually revolves around the well-being and the ambitions of the leader of the group and those around him. Concretely, with ISIS it’s about Baghdadi and the group around him, and their ambition to become powerful.
“With ISIS it is not about Islam”, khodabandeh said resolutely. “No one becomes a member of a sect because of their message”. The recruits from ISIS know nothing about Islam. Because it they did, they would not allow themselves to be lured in”.
Khodabandeh broke with the MKO and now leads an organisation from Great Britain to help people follow his example. Internationally he is well known as an expert on the subject of political sects.
According to him only people who were easily influenced beforehand will fall in to the net of the recruiters. “They have problems; they are running away from something. One from his father. The other one from debt collectors. They have failed in love or at university. They are already a victim before they fall in to the net”.
Camps
For the training of its recruits ISIS had at the end of November in 2014 twenty five camps, fourteen in Syria and eleven in Iraq. One of those was exclusively for fighters from Kazakhstan. After the indoctrination a military training follows, fighters receive physical training and learn how to handle weapons.
Those camps, often far from the inhabited world, are important in the process. That is where the recruit changes in to a suicide bomber, Khodabandeh concludes. The technique used to brainwash someone only works if you have a place where you are able to isolate people from the family and acquaintances, where there are no credit cards, and no place to go back to”.
For the indoctrination of a fighter the recruitment focuses on separating them from everything they had, up to the point that they no longer want to live. For a suicide bomber live itself is a burden. If you are leading a life that you do not want, then you can convince yourself of the beckoning paradise. You only give up a life if you do not have one anyway”.
To show the extent of this, Khodabandeh uses the example of an eighteen year old fighter who was taken prisoner by the Iraqi army before he could carry out his suicide mission. With the approval of the Iraqis, he spent 48 hours with the young man in an effort to pry him loose from the grip of ISIS. “I thought that I should be able to convince him to think differently about things. But after two days and nights he said that I had committed the greatest sin. I had kept him from reaching paradise for forty eight hours. It went that deep. His life was a burden. He begged to end it”.
A sect exists from a nucleus with layers surrounding it. Like and onion, Khodabandeh says. The nucleus is the suicide bomber, for ISIS also the fighters who go in to battle to die. “You only need a certain number of these. But in order to recruit and indoctrinate them there are many more people needed”.
Not everyone becomes a suicide bomber. And that prospect alone will not lure any recruits, neither does the idea of going to kill people, or decapitate leads, khodabandeh believes. They come from money, for charity, for a role in the new state or the army. “In Syria they realize; I have to kill someone while I only came here to bring medicine. The pressure to do that is immense. Because their entire world is now ISIS. If it says that you have to chop off heads, then you do that. Otherwise you will become a victim yourself”.
From that fear, ISIS members convince themselves if they have doubts that they are wrong, and the others, in ISIS, are right. Because everyone outside of ISIS is considered to be the enemy, this would relate to them too should they turn their backs on the group. “they believe they do not have any choice; if they do not cut off that head then they will lose their own”.
Iranian.com,
We have had a report by an ex terrorist member of a dangerous Cult group, based in Iraq, which has been able to escape from the clenches of the Terrorists and disclosed some the tactics used by them to recruit young people.
The Terrorist Cult group is called Mujahidin-e Khalq Iran known also as MEK or PMOI. This Terrorist Cult organization is led by Masoud Rajavi which has gone to hiding since US led coalition forces occupied Iraq in 2003. MEK was financed, armed and supported by Saddam Hossein the Iraqi dictator. MEK’s terrorism was mainly targeted aims inside Iran and helped Saddam Hossein to suppress the Kurdish rebellion during the first Gulf war.
Mr. Yaser Ezati, now lives in Cologne Germany. He disclosed that his father took him and his mother to the MEK Cult when he was 5 years old.
“My father used to beat me and my mother, since my mother did not share my father’s line of thinking but she was forced to stay with the Cult until she was killed in the Cults suicidal attack to Iran from Iraq where 1400 cult members were killed. “
Eight years old Yaser having lost his mother, lost his complete support and was sent to Europe to be brought up by some Cults members and supporters, which had very difficult time and reportedly was beaten up by the families.
A few years later to wash Yaser’s mind to convince him to go to Iraq and Join the Terrorism, MEK Forged a hand writing claiming his mother’s last will, demanding Yaser to take up arms and fight in Iraq.
With this mentality Yaser was taken to Auvers Sur Oise north of Paris the Headquarters of MEK, to meet to be briefed by Maryam Rajavi the Cult Co-Leader to go back to Iraq as Yaser’s mother demanded in her will. Yaser was sent to Iraq when he was 17.
In Iraq, Yaser soon found out that he has been deceived, especially that he witnessed the child abuse inside the Cult and demanded to leave MEK.
“My father used to beat me to death every time I demanded to leave MEK”, Yaser reported.” I told my father that I do not believe in Masoud Rajavi who claims to be Caliphe of the Muslim world. My father told me he will burn me to death if I decide to leave, and I responded, you can do anything you wish, as you do to other members of the Cult when they demand to leave the Cult, but I will not stay in Iraq,”
which resulted in his imprisonment. Yaser’s father is well known for torturing the dissident members who opposed Masoud Rajavi’s Caliphate rule.
Mr. Yaser luckily escaped MEK when Iraq was occupied by the allied forces and US took control of the MEK’s Camp Ashraf. Mr. Yaser also adds that this is the story of hundreds of Children that are being forced to stay inside the Cult. Some have committed suicides due to the great pressure inside the cult resulting from the daily brainwash.
Some have been used in the terrorist activities while they were under aged. Some have been used to commit suicide in London in front of French Embassy in 2003 when Maryam Rajavi was arrested by the French Judiciary for Terrorism and Money Laundry and human trafficking.
Judit Neurink a writer has written a book based on reports of Yaser Ezati form inside the MEK terrorist cult called, “Misled Martyrs: How Iranian terrorists became America’s best friends” (Persian Edition) (Persian) Paperback – January 12, 2009
She writes:
An Iranian woman sets herself alight outside of the French embassy in London. She sacrifices her life for the freedom of her leader, Maryam Rajavi, after her arrest by the French police on terrorism and fraud charges. She is one of at least ten members of Rajavi’s Iranian resistance group, the Mujahedin Khalq, who set themselves on fire in protest at the treatment of their adored leader. These events made me wonder how people reach the point where they believe that giving up their lives will benefit their leader. How did the political organization of God’s Fighters of the People become a sect? What happened to the members for them to allow this to happen? Since there has not been much independently published on the group, I spoke to former members, visited their meetings and tried to find out how a political organization changes into a cult. I also followed Yasser Ezati trying to get released from the tentacles of the Mujahedin Khalq and I researched modern terrorism; are the Mujahedin Khalq a terrorist group, how do they compare with the groups in the Al-Qaida network, why do people think they need violence and terror to assist their case, how can believers, obsessed with good and evil, become murderers?
By: D.B. Arshad, nototerrorism-cults.com
Ebrahim Khodabandeh has published a series of articles in which he reveals what MEK insiders divulge to him about what is happening inside the cult.
In part 8 of the ongoing articles Khodabandeh says this coming week marks the 50th anniversary of the MEK and Massoud Rajavi is on overdrive to spend money to uphold the past (nobody in the MEK still thinks they are continuing the original path of ant-Imperialism).
Rajavi will shortly announce who he has appointed as the new MEK leader and will start a new series of Ideological Revolution sessions.
According to people inside the MEK, this is his last effort to keep it together and stop it disintegrating. The reason is that nobody believes in it anymore and the MEK is falling apart.
The most common doubts and questions which are being raised, and are being suppressed through physical and mental means, are:
– Rajavi always said after Maliki we will move back to Camp Ashraf, but everyone sees that even Camp Liberty is being closed and everyone is being moved to Albania.
– Second, how long does a man live that he is in hiding for 12 years? What’s the point of him?
– Third the NLA and military capability is finished, so what happened to the armed struggle which Rajavi still insists we must believe in? How does that work?
– There are many question about the recent nuclear deal and the fate of Camp Maryam in France as the French are saying more and more clearly that the MEK are no longer – have never been – welcome there.
– There is a huge amount of questioning and uncertainty about the fate of the people in Albania. There is clearly no plan. What is Rajavi’s strategy or tactic for them?
– The main question which frightens the MEK more than any other and which is gaining momentum is, ‘Can anyone give an example of the MEK doing anything for themselves, any independent action or strategy it has followed that has not been dictated by Saddam Hussein, America, Israel or Saudi Arabia?’
