Modern Day Molech

Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. The trial itself wasn't until I was 17. When he was first arrested, he was in jail for three days before they decided that he was safe to be in the community and that he wasn't a flight risk. So they released him and he went home.

And as long as he went to his court date, he was fine. The court process is such a long process. It took four and a half years. He was found guilty on March 2020, but then it wasn't until June of this year that we went back to court for sentencing. And so how long did he get?

15 years. Welcome to Lantern Rescue, a ministry program dedicated to bringing light into the darkness of human trafficking. It's time to light the way to freedom. This is Lantern Rescue. We tell the stories, we talk about rescues, and we empower you to do something about it.

William Wilberforce once said, Let it not be said I was silent when they needed me. This is Lantern Rescue. Fasten your seat belt today on Lantern Rescue. Oh, my goodness. We've got some updates for you that you better hang on to your seat.

Thanks, Robbie. It's good to be on the show again. Just a couple of weeks, primarily because the urgency or the nature of urgent matters that we're into right now. And it seems like this year, especially, we'll probably talk about the Caribbean area in the second half of the show, but it's just been one crisis after another. And we are a countertrafficking unit, but there are things outside of that scope that are occurring in those countries that we are helpful to. And so we try to you know, we try to assist and be helpful. And so the 50,000 foot overview in our operations are let's see, let me let me kind of clarify.

So the listener completely knows even a little more than we've even said in the past. So, you know, there's our our specialized unit, which are the American guys and women and people that are from America. And we set up the programs and we train and then we we even initiate rescues with them and help with intelligence. But as we've always said, as we continue to grow and we work in a country, our hope is that they take ownership of this and they begin to work on their own. And we actually have some places that happens that we have some places that's not happening, you know, because just the turmoil or it's so difficult. But some of the places that are happening is that in one particular country, in the Caribbean, we have a wonderful task force who's working.

They're chasing some pretty hard cases right now. And we're excited about that. Obviously, in West Africa, our listeners know we have a full operation there. And even recently, the inspector general of two of those countries contacted us and said, we need your help this month, especially.

I'm like, we have our help. What do you need? We're running the border where we're handling cases of trafficking. What do you need us to do? And he said, we really need the strongest of the police that you have trained along with your intelligence team. We need you to go into a particular area of our country because this is child sacrifice months.

You hear me, Robert? You know, sacrifice. So, you know, a lot of people, yes, countertrafficking can get high tech. But here we are going back to combating things of just going back to the Old Testament and Moloch.

I mean, here we are combating that. So in this particular country, in West Africa, villages are voodoo, they're kidnapping kids. And the images that I've been given and already and we're familiar with this, but it was a whole month. I mean, they take the organs out of the children.

They cut the tongue out of the child. And they basically leave his body, you know, once they're done with this, with the ritual. And so this doesn't happen in like 10 or 15. This happens in the hundreds, in the hundreds in this region. And so what we've done is with the inspector general, we've identified the area that the communities do this. And then we are doing a pre-op and planning right now to deploy our team and even as much as we can effort into that region to, you know, to set up extra patrols to chase down smugglers and kidnappers and people who are doing this. So that's in one area.

Then if I jump over to Asia region, I was there recently and we're making an effort to teach them how to do stains or reverse things. The problem is the penal code falls short and doesn't necessarily support that activity. And so we're in the middle of working with a legal team and some organizations to help put together a conference for the attorney generals of two countries, including some of their Supreme Court justices, so that we can actually get the penal code to support its definition of human trafficking and the punishment that should occur for that.

And so the prosecution. So, you know, that's a very large project. It's a really open door that's, I think, special. And when it cracked open, I mean, we're running through it to put into place the right people to do that type of conference and training. So then our specialized units can do what we do best. If I left there, I would just make a statement to say, continue to pray for the Far East, the issue of Afghanistan, where obviously the whole American team has had close relationships there. We've been heavily involved, as thousands of former operators, intelligence people and people who have worked there have been involved. And there's been a lot of good things done there.

I think there's a lot of things that also probably weren't the best. But, you know, we're still in the middle of helping and providing critical security and rescue to people. And, you know, people on time are texting me going, oh, are you all with this group?

Look, it's not. We're a really small group. We got a small group of people there that work for us. And we just haven't advertised that a lot beyond this radio show, what I'm saying right now. But we have an effective rescue operation and just be in prayer, especially in the next the next week. So we appreciate that. So at this time, I think there's other places and other things.

But maybe that's a quick review. Robbie, I don't know if you have any questions from that before we get in particular cases. Oh, my, I'm sure like me, a lot of people are saying, oh, my goodness, yes, we need to pray that Human Sacrificing Month is just something that just absolutely unbelievable. But, you know, when you've got a team going in to come up against that, that seems like a completely different kind of structure. Yes, because sometimes those who are participating in this are respected or at least feared leaders of that area. And we're, you know, when you work in Africa, missionaries who are listening or people have been there, you know, they're kings. And there are I mean, there's still this tribal structure that's very respected.

And, you know, depending on their nature of religion or, you know, particularly this voodoo, they carry respect and fear about them that people don't want to help you find those people or people are too scared to speak up, you know. So we'll have to overcome that. And I believe that with prayer and good training and team, I'm sure we will. Yeah, it's it's so it's difficult to hear, but by the same token, it's really feels good to know, wow, we need to be praying about this. We need to be praying about the situation in Afghanistan, even though we're not to know any of the details, because obviously that's top secret stuff. But, you know, it's nice to know that that there's something going on and we can be praying for it here on the ground as part of the support team. And then the Haiti situation is just another big prayer request, right? Because, I mean, these guys are really facing unbelievable challenges.

Yeah, they are. I think maybe the second half of the show this morning, we'll jump on that and address that a little bit. Talk about what we can and really have a conversation about what we should pray for in that country. So I know I don't really have we you know, we have our every week we make arrests, every week we rescue kids and every case is is important to us.

And believe it or not, I think we've probably seen everything under the sun. But still, there are some victims and survivors that we kind of want to we want to share their story, not to glorify ourselves, but to honor these survivors. So people understand what these girls and these little girls go through so that they reach over and look at their own children and say, oh, God, thank you so much that my kids are safe today and not in that environment. And you just take it from there and kind of share with Robbie and the listeners about the case.

Yeah, definitely. So before we get into that, Mark had mentioned about the penal code over in Asia and how it's not the best for anti-trafficking. And that's something we encounter a lot. That's why these arrests are so important, the arrests in conjunction with the rescue of the victims. And we've back in summer of 2020, we helped to rewrite the penal code of one of the countries that we work in to address trafficking and make the laws stricter when it comes to that and make these arrests and prosecutions better. And that's what's important is when you go in doing not only the rescue, but helping with the prosecution, making sure that the arrests are happening, because those are the statistics that fuel these laws and give stricter punishments to the traffickers. So I just want to point that out real quick.

But the good news from the past couple of weeks, we've had some really, really amazing survivor stories and rescues. There was this boy over in Africa that had been grown up learning farming with his dad. He'd been farming with him when he was about seven or eight. He decided he wanted to be a normal kid, didn't really want to work on the farm, and he wanted to go to school and play with the other kids. His dad wasn't real thrilled about that, so he sold him to a farmer in the next country over because he didn't want to deal with his kid anymore and he wanted to make every last penny he could off of him. So he was over there being abused and treated like the traditional style of slavery that people picture back in America, back in the olden days when we had slavery here and they were working on farms.

That's kind of what it was like. So he was in that form of slavery for years before he escaped and our team was able to help assist him getting out and getting to a safe place. So that's a good story to bring up because we talk about sex trafficking a lot and sex slavery and that's horrible. But there also are these cases where the more traditional style of slavery, what people think about from back when there was a slave trade in America.

So that's just a good story to bring up. And then another story that we're really excited about and that is a really amazing rescue, really tragic story, but I think her recovery is going to be amazing. This girl was taken from a village when she was six years old from a village in Africa. She was taken by a woman who held her in her house as a domestic slave. So she was doing tours around the house, just treated as a servant, as a slave within the house.

And this man was friends with this woman, was coming over to the house and he saw this young girl and he saw her kind of grow up and he started becoming interested in her. So when she became older, when she was around a teenager, he offered the woman money to sell him this girl as his bride. So she accepted and the girl did not want to go with him. She was refusing to go, she forced her to go, sold him, so then it became a forced labor situation to a forced marriage situation. She was forced to marry this man, she's 14, 15 at this time, and she was refusing to have relations with him. She didn't want to be there period and she definitely didn't want to sleep in his bed with him. So when she was refusing, he was beating her, he was whipping her with really, really aggressive stuff and she was kind of taking it, just dealing with it. But meanwhile, he would send her to the market and give her a couple dollars to go buy food while he was at work and she would be keeping a couple, she was stashing it away, hiding it in the house. So for years, she did that. And then this week, she escaped. She had enough money, she felt comfortable, she escaped.

And some people found her and got her hooked up with our team and our team, you know, here's the story, there's a shock, you know, so heartbroken for this girl. They take care of her, get her a safe place to stay that night, get her in good clothes, cleaned up. And then the next day, she's been gone from her village since she was six, she doesn't remember where she's from.

They kind of figure it out and they start walking towards their village and they see this guy in the road and they ask him kind of general questions about it and he directs them to the village. So she gets there and she, just by luck, finds her old home and her parents are still there. So they see her, they haven't seen her in 10 years. She's been gone since she was six, she's 16 now.

That's huge time in a child's life. And they're just crying, they're super upset. They're just so grateful that she's home, they can't believe it. They thought she was dead. Unfortunately, her father had become paralyzed in an accident in that time between them, but they're both of her parents are still alive.

They're in the same home. They took her in with open arms. They're thrilled to have her back. She's living in a really undeveloped village in Africa, and our team is going to be sending her to an apprenticeship as a hairdresser. So she'll have a career doing that. And then we'll be obviously, just like we do with the rest of our survivors, we'll be following her recovery story. Wow, wow, I mean, we can praise God for that, yeah. We've got to go to a break.

I hate to jump in here, Mark, but when we come back, we've got so much more to share. Lantern Rescue is a USA-based organization that conducts international rescue operations for people suffering from human trafficking. Lantern specializes in sending former U.S. Special Operation law enforcement and intelligence personnel to partner with host nations and assist them in creating specialized units to combat ongoing security problems, such as genocide, terrorism, and human trafficking.

As a nonprofit charity, they offer services free of charge to their host nations. Human trafficking has grown into the second largest criminal activity in the world, reaching an estimated $150 billion in annual activity. Lantern Rescue has developed rapidly to combat trafficking. Lantern operates through a trained international network in order to rescue women and children from sex and labor slavery and facilitates holistic aftercare services.

They're gearing up for operations right now, and you can go to lanternrescue.org to see how you can support them financially. The following program contains sensitive content, including accounts of sexual abuse and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.

Welcome back to this amazing episode, really, of Lantern Rescue. Of these stories and updates are just, you know, mind-blowing. But Mark, you wanted to add a little bit more understanding to the young lady's story that we just heard.

Yes, and I appreciate Rand kind of updating our listeners on that. The occurrence that happened to this girl at age six is something that we see a lot. And that is either a higher class individual, a business or supposed business owner, or a wealthy family. They'll drive their literally a Land Rover or Lexus into that this village and they will act as if they are there to help somebody. And if they are some type of benevolent person, that they want to take children, that they want to give them an internship, or that they have a new business and kids can work there or young ladies can work there and send money back to their families.

And so the deceiving means in this story is we see it everywhere. And that is a wealthier couple came to these parents and said, look, your child needs to be in school. We'll cover her school bill. Let us take her and get her an education. And that's what started the trafficking of this child.

So, you know, you can imagine I mean, I can't I mean, you can kind of imagine being these parents who met well, because they're so poor, they have no options. They're hoping for a new future for their child that she's going to go to school. She's going to get an education. They're going to hear from her. She's going to get a job. Maybe she'll be a nurse. Maybe she'll be at work in the government.

You know, you can imagine their aspirations. Instead, they hug this child goodbye and then suddenly they never hear anymore. They can't call anybody. There's no 911.

There's no missing persons report. There's nowhere to go for help, you know, and and so now that this little child is in hell. I mean, this kid's left and already nervous about school, probably, but now finding out she's not in school, she's nothing but a slave. And now, you know, she also also and we've got rough images of this girl. She is 17 and her back is so flogged. She has been beaten from corner to corner on her back scars.

And these scars probably travel back to when she was six and seven and eight and all the way through her life. So that when they have nowhere to turn and nowhere to go to, this is something that we try to address. And particularly West Africa, we have a counter trafficking office.

Lantern has a presence there. And so that's become such a good thing, because when this girl escaped at 17 and she's running for her life and she has nowhere to go. And she comes to somebody and that somebody goes, well, I know where to take you. I know that because they don't let me make this clear to they don't trust police necessarily in another world, in this region of the world.

So a lot of a lot of kidnapping situation, trafficking, they're reluctant, even if there is a it's not a 9-1-1, but even if there's a police force to go to, they're reluctant to go to the police force because it's probably corrupt. Right. So having us there and having that presence, us being American, having a trained group of people, there's a comfort there that's not necessarily there with just any cop. And so how success occurs, and I'm so happy about this story because this girl got to somebody coming from another country who knew about us, got in touch with us so that we could give her a secure passage back, get her to the office, get her taken care of.

And as Ren said, you know, follow her in this recovery story. So clearly that's just the favor of God, Mark. I mean, that's the thing you see. God is just making people know this is what's going on.

Yeah. But to all the moms out there, I'm still, I just can't stop saying this. Can you imagine your little girl, you're sending her off to school, a boarding school even, something that you think is going to be a good decision for your child, and you just never see her, and you just have absolutely nowhere to turn, no one who cares, no one who will listen. And that that is the problem and why trafficking is so such a big issue. This is one of the problems.

There's one, there's just nowhere to turn to. And so, Lantern, we're trying to give people a place to turn to, you know, the little boy and the domestic slavery. Every time we share a story about a little boy or we're involved in a case or we're physically there and we're removing a boy, I cannot help but think about the country of Haiti, and that's kind of what we're going to finish out this show about. Because in Haiti, years ago, I mean, my first encounter to slavery was in Haiti.

They have a system that's actually allowed in Haiti to enslave children, particularly after the earthquake, because there were so many that were orphaned. So, you know, moving over to Haiti, everybody who's maybe in touch or not in touch with the news, you know, the current situation as of yesterday is that the embassy is removing, you know, saying to leave and they're moving their some of their people out and the commercial flights are going to close. The ironic thing is, I think just the third time we've had this conversation on the radio about Haiti. I mean, this is how, you know, how many times since the radio show started have we alerted our listeners that, hey, Haiti, the embassy's trying to leave and there's going to be no more flights to Haiti. And yet, you know, we've continued to operate there and keep going down. I remember back in 2019, flying down on a plane, pretty much by myself. It was the last commercial flight that I could get to Haiti, and they were shutting them all down and landed. And the embassy had left the day before.

And how much hope I was able to bring those people just to my presence. So I think, though, the situation now is even worse. Is the gangs have clearly gotten emboldened against even the U.S. government so much that they've kidnapped Americas.

And with every negotiation effort, I think they can change the whole of what they want. So outside of even that, I think what our listeners need to know is you imagine being in a country today where every single gas station is empty. There's no diesel. And I got a video this morning of a diesel tank that had been brought, you know, had been filled and gangs shot holes in it. And right now, as we speak, it's being poured out like it's just pouring out the sides. Right.

And the next private video we're going to get or hear about is somebody throwing a match on it. That's typically what gangs will do. So why?

I'm just out of curiosity. Why would they do that? They want control. And the way to control is to create an environment of pandemic. Yeah. Chaos. And they have definitely created chaos. So you got you got some things you want to comment on.

I mean, I've got more I definitely want to share with listeners. But yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so really what I want to do is like compare and contrast the rest of Africa versus what it looks like in Haiti. So in Africa, our team over there, they're rescuing kids daily. You know, they're able people are able to walk to our station. They're able to get a ride on the back of a motorcycle to our office and get help. We're able to get them food, clothes. You know, it's it's pretty nice. It's pretty peaceful.

Africa is not perfect, but where our office is at, it's pretty peaceful and safe. And we're able to run the operation. We're able to help people in countries like Haiti, especially right now. We can't even get gas to go rescue these people. We can't get everyone in the same location at once because no one can get there. So we're not even able to go there's still people that need help down there, but we can't get to them.

So it's it's crazy. And for the first time since we've been operating in Haiti, one of the people that we've been working with there for a long time, a powerful family down there has asked us to not come. They're afraid that we're going to be killed. And that's the first time that we've ever been in Haiti that people have told us. And, you know, it's not necessarily going to stop us, but that people have told us to not come, that it's that dangerous down there right now. So it's crazy. It's it's such a stark contrast to our operation in Africa because the want and the need is still there. And they still have this good heart wanting to help victims of human trafficking, but they physically can't.

And when the violence is so bad and so extreme and just so widespread, not only can you not get gas, you might get killed trying to get there. So it's just it's bad. It's heartbreaking.

And we're we're just trying to find a way to navigate it right now. Probably a lot of churches that hear us, Robbie, or a lot of Christians who listen to the show, who attend a church at some point in that church's ministry, they've probably given or done something in Haiti. Right. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Probably probably your church has and you know, they've been there and there's a lot of our listeners who have been there back in, you know, back in 2013, 14, 15. I mean, even though the earthquake had happened, what a great, safe place. There were no kidnappings. There was, you know, it was a huge humanitarian effort.

It was, you know, it's a good thing. Now, this year alone, I think I think the caseload of kidnappings well over 600 just this year. That's the ones that are reported.

I would say five times that are not reported. Just just just even last week, last weekend, there was a case of someone who was kidnapped that we not met him, but we kind of have direct contact with. And he was taken by a smaller gang.

He wasn't taken by the gang that's currently hold the the others. But what happened to that is, you know, we make a recommendation and say, look, here's a kidnapping unit. We'll take you into the office. We'll file a report. What they'll do that that will authorize some some force from people that we have and we can do some things. They're too scared to do that.

Just like I mentioned in Africa, like they're too scared to go to the cops. So they didn't do that. And so they end up paying the money. Right.

Yeah. They pay the money. Usually it's reduced. I mean, here's the reality in Haiti. A lot of times they ask for like four hundred thousand dollars and end up being settled for like four grand. You know, so, you know, they they scrap together, get that money and they pay it. And the person was released, thankfully, because sometimes they'll be like, oh, no, we need you know, we need ten thousand more and they'll drag the family on. But that's how hopeless the government situation is to the people. So they're they're handling their own kidnapping cases.

You know, they're handling their own their own negotiations and everything. So I hate we're out of time. It's just wow. Yeah, we got to pray for them.

Wow. We have so much to pray for. You can hear around the world and we're so grateful to you guys and all you're doing and to know how we can pray. Thank you so much for listening today. We're so glad you joined us in this battle against evil. Thank you, Robbie. Appreciate it. This is the Truth Network.