On February 12, 2021, two anonymous plaintiffs filed a class action complaint in Alabama Federal Court against pornographer MG Freesites, an international syndicated pornography corporation headquartered in the Republic of Cyprus and having organizations and doing business in at least 6 countries including the U.S. (as Mindgeek, USA, Inc., Delaware).

For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. ~Ephesians 5:12

Intentionally avoiding further promotion of Mindgeek’s evil operations, it is noted that Mindgeek owns and operates some of the most well-known and well-trafficked web-sites where illegal pornography, including some of the worst imaginable perversion, is provided for free, to everyone, everywhere, on the Internet.

In “Doe v. Mindgeek” (plaintiff’s identities protected by a pseudonym) two plaintiffs, representative of all similarly situated victims, now-adult women, who were under eighteen years of age at the time of filming, were drugged, raped and depicted in commercial sex acts and child pornography, which was then made available for viewing on websites owned, operated and controlled by defendant pornographers who exploited this unbelievably vile child sex abuse material for profit.

The conscience of our society is becoming more and more seared with respect to the horrible wickedness of pornography.

As a very sobering, and particularly educational for us who are parents, reminder of how serious this problem is, and our culture’s typical reaction, readers are encouraged to recall the impact of pornography on serial killer Ted Bundy as shown in Dr. James Dobson’s famous interview (1989).

It is a great providence therefore, that several federal laws have been passed in recent years to penalize wicked  businesses engaging in sex trafficking and child pornography.

Congress passed in 2000, re-authorized in 2003, and amended in 2008, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”) penalizing the full range of human trafficking offenses, including the sex trafficking of children under the age of 18 or sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.

This law:

• permits a party to bring a civil claim against perpetrators,
• and against a person who, although not the actual perpetrator of a violation, knowingly benefited from participating in a venture that it should have known was engaged in a violation,
• and makes it a crime to benefit financially or receive anything of value from participation in a venture which knowingly solicits by any means a person to engage in a commercial sex act,
• or that the person has not attained the age of 18 years old and will be caused to engage in a commercial sex act.
• eliminates the requirement of proof that a particular defendant knew a sex trafficking victim was a minor if the defendant had a reasonable opportunity to observe the minor.
• allows sex trafficking survivors to bring suit against anyone who benefits financially or receives anything of value from the violation.

The 2018 passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (“FOSTA”) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (“SESTA”) clarified that these laws would be enforced against internet and web-based companies that advertise and profit from sex trafficking. The FOSTA/SESTA amendment to the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) makes web-based companies liable regardless of whether the conduct occurred, before or after enactment.

These are great laws, providing significant criminal and civil liability to these businesses, but somebody has to go after them!

That is why it is very encouraging for this long overdue legal action to move forward. It is the very heart of justice in our American Republican self-government.

The complaint alleges that one prominent Mindgeek web-site uploads 18,000 videos daily, with an average length of approximately 11 minutes per video.  Mindgeek’s attempt to avoid publishing material in violation of these laws requires moderators to review approximately 1,100 minutes of video each hour.

The complaint further alleges that Mindgeek’s employees, knowing this to be an impossible task,  are even encouraged not to remove child pornography by its policy of paying annual bonuses based on the number of videos approved.

The complaint alleges that the images of plaintiffs continue to be displayed, despite being identified as minors and requests to remove them.

The suit requests injunctive or any other equitable relief to plaintiffs and requires the defendants to identify and remove child pornography and implement a very long list of corporate-wide policies and practices to prevent continued dissemination of child pornography or child sex trafficking.

The suit also requests all available damages, in favor of both plaintiffs and the entire class, including:

• compensatory and punitive damages,
• prejudgment interest, costs and attorneys’ fees,
• and restitution and disgorgement of all profits and unjust enrichment obtained as a result of defendants’ unlawful conduct.

It is easy to see that such an award could be enormous.

If successful, this case has the potential to severely harm this morally debased business through:

• Taking back large amounts of money gained from illegal activities,
• Eliciting enormous punitive damages for intentional bad behavior (readers may recall the Liebeck v. McDonald‘s coffee spill case, where actual damages of $200,000 were awarded, with $2.7 million dollars of punitive damages added for McDonald’s bad behavior), multiplied by thousands or millions of victims of sexual trafficking and child pornography,
• Ordering cumbersome, potentially business-threatening, policies and practices to actually prevent further violations, and
• Exposure to additional criminal action

The case looks very good from a legal perspective, satisfying all elements of the relevant laws.  These are excellent and world-class attorneys representing plaintiffs.  The judge is a George W. Bush appointee.  A success will open the door for similar lawsuits, and possible criminal action.

They dug a pit in my way, but they have fallen into it themselves.  ~Psalm 57:6b

In addition to winning the suit however, the most difficult obstacles to recovery and destruction of this evil business, will be identifying more class members, and the difficulty of enforcement of court sanctions against a largely foreign corporation.

Christians should continually pray for the attorneys and plaintiffs in this action, and also that the Lord would bring similar lawsuits to other pornographers.

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Written by Anne-Christine Hoff

As the four-year anniversary of the mass shooting of Dallas police officers passes, a lawsuit has been reopened which alleges that social media outlets allowed the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to radicalize Micah Johnson, leading the former U.S. Army reservist to take the lives of five police officers while injuring nine others.

Plaintiffs in Retana v. Twitter, Inc. allege that about two years before the attack, Johnson – a black nationalist – began sympathizing with Hamas. According to court documents, Johnson told a woman that he had just returned from Afghanistan and that “he was very much pro-Gaza,” leading her “to believe that he had been radicalized to the Palestinian cause supporting violence against Israel.”

Although three separate lawsuits have yet to present conclusive evidence of connections between Hamas and the Dallas shooting, black identity extremists from Dallas have expressed appreciation for the terrorist group’s violent revolutionary tactics, while Hamas’s local Islamist proxies have co-opted black civil rights causes to bring attention to their own radical agenda.

Plaintiffs in these cases discuss the long-standing connections between Hamas and national black separatist organizations. They point to Hamas sympathizers who furnished advice and support in 2014 to police protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, and they refer to “black separatist hate groups” which took a 10-day trip  in 2015 to the Palestinian Territories and Israel. Led by a guide from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, activists from the black civil rights group Dream Defenders participated in a riot against Israeli soldiers and law enforcement.

In Dallas, black identity extremists continue to sympathize with Hamas while lauding its violent tactics.

Founded in 1989 in Dallas, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) advocates an anti-white, anti-Semitic message of “black unity, collective action and cooperative economics.” Its leaders openly sympathize with the Palestinian resistance while demonizing the “crackers over in Israel” who oversee a “Synagogue of Satan.”

In 2014, NBPP Chief of Staff Chawn Kweli praised the insurgent tactics employed by Hamas and said that African Americans should “learn to fight for [their] land” from the Palestinians. “They don’t have all them tanks … but they got heart. They got will. They got guerilla tactics,” he said.

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is a black nationalist militia that made headlines in 2014 for carrying out armed community patrols in predominantly African American neighborhoods of South Dallas. Johnson was reportedly affiliated with this racist hate group, and after his death HPNGC co-founder Yafeuh Balogun praised the cop killer and predicted that, “He will be celebrated one day.”

In 2018, Michael Thervil of Voda Consulting trained HPNGC members in marksmanship, community patrolling, and counter protests.  As with NBPP members, Thervil praised Hamas as a model for African American insurrectionists to emulate “in terms of combat,” professing his “deepest love for Hamas and those fearless fighters in Hezbollah.”

Just one month after HPNGC members were drilled in “counter protesting,” the black militia put its training to the test when it appeared alongside NBPP members at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Armed with assault rifles, the black nationalists provided security for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) during its annual conference.

As recently as the early 1990s, ISNA sent checks to the “Palestinian Mujahideen,” the former name for Hamas’s military wing, and in 2009 a federal judge ruled that there is “ample evidence” tying ISNA to Hamas.

Hamas also has deep roots in the non-black Dallas Islamic community. The most well-known and earliest connection is documented in USA v. Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the largest terrorism finance case in U.S. history  In 2008, the founders of the Richardson, Texas, charity were convicted of numerous charges related to financing Hamas, including conspiracy, money laundering, providing material support for terrorism, and tax evasion.

Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of the Dallas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was sentenced to 65 years in prison for his role in funneling $12 million to Hamas after 1995, when the U.S. Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. CAIR is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the same Hamas financing trial, a label that was subsequently upheld in federal appellate court.

Does Hamas now depend on its U.S. proxies to influence black nationalists?

As with CAIR and ISNA, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is an outgrowth of the now-defunct Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), a Hamas propaganda front group that was dissolved in 2004 for funding terrorism, and several AMP board members were members of IAP before its dissolution.

On June 12, AMP-Texas organized a Black Lives Matter rally with local mosques, including Dallas’s Nation of Islam chapter, a black separatist, quasi-Sunni religious movement commonly rejected by mainstream Muslims. During a similar protest one week earlier, AMP-Dallas Director Fadya Risheq repeated an anti-Semitic smear that effectively holds Israeli Jews responsible for police violence against African Americans.

Risheq was merely parroting views expressed on Hamas’s English-language website, which dismissed racial animosity as the primary cause of police brutality, pointing out that the “militarization of the U.S. police and its use of deadly violence … is a relatively new phenomenon that has been largely imported from Israel.”

Celebrity Imam Omar Suleiman, the founder and president of the Irving-based Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, is perhaps the most celebrated Muslim cleric in Texas – if not the U.S. Suleiman has been a vocal advocate of Hamas proxies such as AMP, and he is featured on its website soliciting donations. He headlined a 2017 AMP rally in Washington D.C., before appearing one year later as a guest speaker at AMP’s annual conference.

Suleiman is also a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter, and he has tweeted his support for violent Palestinian resistance. On July 14, 2014, he gave this prayer on Twitter:

“God willing on this blessed night as the 3^rd Intifada begins, the beginning of the end of Zionism is here. May Allah help us overcome this monster, protect the innocent of the world, and accept the murdered as martyrs. ameen.”

On May 14, 2018, Suleiman posted a Facebook post in support of the Hamas-led Hamas-endorsed March of Return riots, claiming that Israel wanted to “kill off” Palestinians and encouraging resistance “by any means necessary.”

Historically, Dallas has been an incubator for both Islamic extremism and black supremacism. These two movements may not share the same aspirations, but they certainly share many of the same hatreds. Their alliance is an abstract one, drawn together through the demonization of both the Israeli military and American law enforcement, under whose jackboots Palestinians and African-Americans are, ostensibly, jointly oppressed. This conspiracy would link Gaza and Minneapolis as two battlefields in a single war.

And yet black supremacists are largely not Islamist; and Islamists are certainly not truly committed to the idea of black supremacism. One is exploiting the other, using African American grievances to deflect criticism of radical Islam. And Micah Johnson may not be the last radical to be drawn in.

Anne-Christine Hoff is the Dallas Counter-Islamist Grid Research Fellow of Middle East Forum. This article was originally published at JihadWatch.org.

The Thomas More Society filed a complaint in federal court stating that both the state of New York and New York City are discriminating against pro-life advocates.

The complaint, which was filed Jan. 21, 2020 on behalf of Evergreen Association, Inc., accuses the State and City of New York of disregarding the charitable organization’s First Amendment rights. Evergreen operates maternal health and pregnancy centers under the names “Expectant Mother Care” and “EMC Frontline Pregnancy Centers.” The Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Chris Slattery, Director of EMC Frontline, described the discrimination: “We are all about saving the unborn lives threatened by abortion. Thus, we are all about offering alternatives to abortion. New York’s discriminatory laws undermine our charitable mission. How could we in good conscience hire someone who advocates abortion to encourage expectant mothers not to pursue that deadly route?”

According to a media release from the Thomas More Society, the complaint charges discrimination against pro-life organizations in the following ways:

• Violation of the right to association (First Amendment)
• Violation of due process (Fourteenth Amendment)
• Violation of free speech (First Amendment)

In a public radio program in Jan. 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo denounced pro-life advocates as “extreme conservatives,” saying that “they have no place in the state of New York.” Despite repeated calls for him to apologize, the governor has refused. In the same pattern, the Thomas More Society states, “A recent string of New York attorney generals has sought to silence peaceful citizens offering abortion-bound women information on life-affirming alternatives.”

In remarks about the legislation, Thomas More Society Special Counsel Timothy Belz stated, “This is especially egregious when you consider that the law was packaged with other bills specifically designed to strip away any regulation of abortion. New York’s ‘Boss Bill’ was passed in tandem with the state’s Reproductive Health Act, which legalizes abortion until the birth of the child, and the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, which requires health insurers to provide no-cost birth control, including abortifacient drugs, in their health plans.” In Illinois, the Reproductive Health Act (SB 25), passed by the General Assembly at the end of the spring 2020 session, also requires all employers in the state to provide no-cost birth control and abortions up to nine months in their health plans.

According to the Thomas More Society release, “The case challenges the constitutionality of New York’s so-called ‘Boss Bills,’ laws that make support of abortion a protected class in the employment nondiscrimination laws of both New York State and New York City, thus forbidding employers from making hiring and promotion decisions  based upon ‘reproductive health’ decisions of employees or applicants, including the decision to have or promote abortions. The laws pose existential threats to pro-life organizations because they impose debilitating fines and also provide for statutory damages.”

Belz explained, “These laws violate our client’s rights in multiple ways. Expectant Mother Care and EMC Frontline exist for the purpose of advocating for and providing desperate women with alternatives to abortion. Forcing them to hire someone who promotes abortion would completely undermine their mission.”

“It’s ludicrous,” said Belz, “and tramples all over Expectant Mother Care and EMC Frontline’s right of expressive association guaranteed by the First Amendment. These state and city laws also violate our client’s right to free speech and right to due process. Finally, the state’s failure to define ‘reproductive health decision making’ makes the laws unconstitutionally vague.”

The Thomas More Society is a not-for-profit law firm headquartered in Chicago and Omaha, dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, and religious liberty. 

To read the complaint visit https://www.thomasmoresociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Complaint-for-Declaratory-and-Injunctive-Relief-1-16-20.pdf.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

Educating Voices, Inc. is pleased to present Alex Berenson for an eye-opening report, based on his new best seller, that exposes the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug. Tickets are free, but you must register in advance!

Featured Speaker:

Alex Berenson is a former New York Times reporter and award-winning novelist. Born in New York, he attended Yale University and went on to join the New York Times in 1999. There he covered everything from the drug industry to Hurricane Katrina and served two stints as a correspondent in Iraq.

Books will be available for $15.00 each and Alex Berenson will be available following the presentation for signing.

Educating Voices, Inc is a national organization founded to proactively support education and communication about the dangers of marijuana use, medical marijuana and legalized marijuana and other drugs, and to share truthful, well-researched, fact checked information.

Illinois Partners Providing Marijuana Education is a coalition of autonomous voices whose mission is to educate, network, collaborate, convene, strengthen, and mobilize organizations from different sectors across Illinois to counteract misinformation about marijuana and legalized marijuana.