Congress SPEECHLESS After Witness Names The Council Behind Sharia Courts On US Soil

[0:00] There's a paragraph that used to sit on the public website of a religious tribunal operating just [0:05] outside Dallas. If you searched for it today, you would not find it. The tribunal changed its own [0:10] page. But before the language disappeared, a congresswoman from Wyoming printed it, carried [0:16] it into a house judiciary hearing room, and read it into the permanent record of the United States [0:21] Congress, where nothing can ever be deleted. The exact words are in the back half of this video, [0:27] and they're stranger than you are imagining. There is a little girl in a Texas suburb whose [0:32] entire future runs through that paragraph. There are two organizations named under oath in that room, [0:38] and there is one word answer at the very end that closes the whole question. The hearing room was a [0:44] White House Judiciary Committee chamber on the third floor of the Rayburn building. The witness at the [0:50] table was identified for the record as Miss Mecklenburg, a researcher and former member of [0:55] a Muslim community who had spent more than a decade documenting how sharia-based tribunals [1:00] operate inside American cities. The Republican across from her was Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, [1:06] a constitutional lawyer who argued federal cases for 25 years before she ran for Congress. [1:12] You may have already seen 30 seconds of this hearing. One sentence from this testimony traveled [1:16] across social media within two days. The sentence in which the witness claimed that councils operating in [1:22] America had issued religious rulings saying apostates and blasphemers could be killed. That sentence became [1:28] the headline, but the headline skipped the part a courtroom lawyer would call the evidence. Hageman did not [1:34] build her five minutes around an accusation. She built it around a document, a printout of a website [1:40] that no longer reads the way it did when she printed it. Most of the coverage missed what that document [1:46] actually said. This video is about the paper on her desk. Start with the word the tribunals use to [1:52] describe themselves, voluntary. Every tribunal identified in this hearing presents its services [1:57] as something members of the community freely choose, a private alternative for marriage disputes, divorces, [2:04] inheritance questions, and conflicts with people in positions of leadership. Hageman took that word apart [2:10] first. First, she asked Mecklenburg whether participation can honestly be called voluntary [2:15] when the person walking in faces social pressure, family pressure, and community pressure to stay [2:22] out of American courts. Mecklenburg said yes, people have been coerced into these bodies, and then she went [2:29] further. She described communities across Texas where a person can now be born, raised, married, and buried [2:36] without ever dealing with anyone outside the faith. Her phrase for it was fully operational parallel [2:43] societies. Inside those societies, she said, there are courts. Therefore, the question stopped being [2:48] whether these tribunals exist. The question became, who runs them? And this is where Mecklenburg said [2:54] something no previous witness had put on a congressional record. The men acting as judges, she testified, [3:01] are largely coming in from outside the country. They introduced themselves under many titles, [3:06] an imam, a sharia expert, a sharia jurist. But look closely, she said, and they are functioning as judges. [3:13] There's a name on the printout on Hageman's desk we're getting to, and the organization behind that [3:19] webpage knew exactly what it was building. Here is where the paper comes in. The webpage Hageman printed [3:25] belonged to one specific tribunal operating near Dallas. Not a rumor of a tribunal. A functioning body [3:31] with a public website, a state admission, and written opinions about the American legal system. [3:36] Before this hearing, that website said something remarkable about what the tribunal believed itself [3:42] to be. I'm going to hold the exact wording a little longer because the order in which Hageman used it [3:48] matters. First, she laid the constitutional floor. She named the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 14th amendments out loud. [3:55] The guarantees of due process, counsel, a jury, and equal protection that follow every American into [4:01] every courtroom in the country. Then she listed what those guarantees look like in practice. Public [4:07] records anyone can request, decisions that get filed, attorneys in the room, a transcript of every [4:14] proceeding. That is the machinery that lets you appeal a bad ruling, expose a biased judge, and prove [4:21] what was said. Then she turned to the witness and asked how much of that machinery exists inside a [4:27] Sharia tribunal in Texas. Mecklenburg's answer fit in a single breath. It does not. Nothing to request, [4:35] nothing on file, and no transcript of what was decided. A ruling handed down in a room the United [4:40] States government cannot see into, over the marriage, the children, or the inheritance of an American [4:47] citizen. Which brings the hearing to the two names. Mecklenburg identified, on the record, [4:52] the organizational lawyer above the local tribunals, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, [4:59] the FIC Council of North America. She described the assembly as the legal arm inside the broader [5:04] network, the body that issues fatwas, the religious rulings that tribunals on American soil are then [5:10] expected to enforce. And she told the committee that a current category of those rulings concern what [5:16] should happen to people who leave the faith or insult it. That claim is hers, delivered under oath, [5:22] stated twice, and it is the sentence the internet already knows. What the internet does not know is [5:28] what Hegman was holding while the room went still. She never waved the printout. She never raised her voice [5:34] about it. A trial lawyer for a quarter century, she understood that the most damaging thing in that [5:39] chamber was not an accusation from a witness. Accusations can be argued with. The most damaging thing in that [5:45] chamber was the tribunal's own writing composed by the tribunal, published by the tribunal about the [5:52] country it operates in. Before the tape rolls, you should know two things are coming after the big [5:58] moment. Watch what the tribunal did to its own website, and watch the single word that ends the [6:03] exchange. Here's what the paper said. I'm quoting it exactly as it was read into the congressional record. [6:09] The tribunal describes itself as a unique institution of its kind in the United States, established with [6:16] the intention of setting a precedent that would be emulated and duplicated throughout the country. [6:21] Not a quiet community service, a prototype, in its own words, meant to spread, and then the website graded [6:28] the alternative. The courts of the United States of America, the tribunal wrote, are costly and consist of [6:34] ineffective lawyers. A body operating on American soil, ruling over American citizens, publicly declaring [6:41] the American judicial system beneath its own. Read that line again, then hold on to this. [6:47] Hegman noted on the record that the tribunal has since altered its website. The founding language is [6:53] gone from the page. It is not gone from the congressional record because nothing ever is. The words the tribunal [6:59] no longer once read are now preserved permanently by the government it dismissed. Moments later, [7:05] Hegman asked the witness to confirm that what she described violates the constitution and the rights [7:11] of the individuals inside those tribunals. One word came back, correct. After the gavel, [7:17] the clip of this exchange spread within two days and almost every version of it cut straight to the [7:22] fatwa sentence. The paragraph you just heard barely made the coverage, even though it is the one piece of [7:28] evidence written by the other side. Somewhere in a Texas suburb, the little girl Mecklenburg described [7:35] is growing up inside a community that will not tell her what she is owed under the fifth, the sixth, [7:41] the seventh, and the 14th. The paragraph that dismissed her country's courts has been scrubbed, [7:46] the record of it has not. And one more thing, there is an 11 page tribunal proceeds document out of [7:52] Dallas that never made it into this exchange. That is the next video. See it for yourself. [7:59] Thank you. In our previous hearing on this topic, I focused on how Sharia-based tribunals [8:04] will jeopardize America's rights to equal protection and due process under the law, [8:09] particularly in cases involving women and minors. We learned that the presence of Sharia-based [8:14] tribunals in the United States date back decades and that it is common practice for these tribunals [8:20] to stray from a traditional judicial proceedings, meaning that participants risk losing protections [8:25] guaranteed under the Constitution, as was just being debated. One example of such a tribunal operating [8:32] near Dallas before altering its website actually prided itself on being a unique institution of its kind [8:38] in the United States with the intention of setting a precedent that would be emulated and duplicated [8:44] throughout the country. That same tribunal further claimed that, quote, conflicting problems within [8:49] American Muslim society may range from personal and family matters, such as marriage and divorce, [8:54] as well as disputes among community members and those in positions of leadership. The courts of the [9:00] United States of America are costly and consist of ineffective lawyers, end quote. To be clear, [9:06] conformity to the Constitution is the governing factor behind the operation of our judicial system. [9:12] The 5th, 6th, 7th and 14th Amendments are there to ensure that everyone has a right to a fair trial. [9:19] While the First Amendment is intended to ensure that every American citizen can practice the [9:24] religion of their choosing, it does not permit any parallel tribunal or body to supersede the role [9:32] of our judiciary in the protections of those constitutional rights. Ms. Meckelberg, Sharia-based tribunals [9:39] often label themselves as offering voluntary services, but is it not true that individuals have been [9:45] coerced into using these bodies because of social, social, familial, and other community pressures? [9:52] Yes, I was actually saying earlier that right now in communities all across Texas, [9:58] all across different places throughout the United States, from birth to death, they now have full [10:03] operational societies that somebody could actually be born in America and never have to operate [10:09] outside of and deal with any kind of non-Muslim. So within these societies, they have their courts. [10:15] And if you notice, most of the Imams that are the heads that are coming from outside the country are [10:21] Sharia judges. And these Sharia judges hand down these different- they use many different names. [10:29] They will say that they're an imam, they're a Sharia expert, a Sharia jurist, etc. But if you go and you look, [10:36] these are the people who are acting as the judges within these communities. And there's an entire organization around this. [10:44] If you look up the assembly Muslim of jurists in America, they're issuing fatwas. We have fic council [10:50] people who are also, again, that's a Sharia judge. These are people who are putting out fatwas that you can [10:57] kill apostates, blasphemers. This is happening inside America. And again- [11:02] That's clearly a violation of the constitution and the rights of the individuals who are involved in [11:06] those tribunals, correct? Correct.