Mexican Jihad?

Back on the west side of the pond: the reconquest of "Aztlan." (Hat tip: JJ).

The San Gabriel Valley east of LA was sparsely inhabited farmland back then, but Lucky [Baldwin] saw it as a place where people could have homes and communities. He bought square miles of it for a few dollars an acre, and created a number of cities, among them Arcadia, Monrovia, and Baldwin Park.

You would think there would be a statue of its founder in Baldwin Park, in tribute to Lucky Baldwin as an embodiment of American vision and capitalism. But there is not. Instead there is [a monument inscribed with "This land was Mexican once, was Indian always, and is and will be again" and "it was better before they came."]

They, of course, are the hated “Anglos,” the white European-Americans who “stole” the land from Mexico – who stole it from Spain who stole it from Indian tribes such as the Chumash (not the Aztecs, whose empire was in central Mexico, 2,000 miles away from LA), who stole it from other Indian tribes like the Shoshone.

Two weeks ago on May 14, a small group of folks staged a peaceful rally to demand the removal of the racist monument, which is on public property and was erected by the city council at taxpayer expense. The rally was met by a far larger, violent counter-demonstration led by an organization of Mexican Nazis who call themselves Reconquistas.

These are people who want to “reconquer” the entire American Southwest ceded to the US in 1848 and have it become part of Mexico again. What makes them Nazis is their pathological anti-Semitism. Their hatred for America is equaled only by their hatred of Jews.

One of them yelled at a television cameraman at the Baldwin Park fracas: "Too bad Osama Bin Laden didn’t drop a hydrogen bomb on that Jewish s**thole town Manhattan." The TV video can be seen here.

One of the Reconquista chants was "Go back to Europe, go back to England, Gringos." Another was, "Viva (long live) Zarqawi, the Gringo Killer," in praise of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s killing American soldiers in Iraq.

On their website, Aztlan (referring to their crackpot theory that the American Southwest was the Aztec homeland of "Aztlan"), about half of the links are to anti-Semitic sites – including one demanding an end to "certified Kosher" labels on food products called the "Kosher Nostra Scam."

The principal organizer of the Reconquistas is a student organization called MEChA – Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlan - The Student Movement of Aztlan Chicanos, with dozens of chapters in California schools. A requirement for MEChA membership is an agreement to work for “the liberation of Aztlan,” including “the physical liberation of Occupied America.”

MEChA’s motto, as stated in its founding document, The Spiritual Plan of Aztlan, could not possibly be more racist: Por La Raza Todo, Fuera de La Raza Nada: for the race (their own “bronze” race), everything; outside the race, nothing.

Antonio Villaraigosa, the new mayor of Los Angeles, was president of the UCLA chapter of MEChA in 1974. He has yet to clearly and publicly denounce the concept of Aztlan, or denounce the Baldwin Park thugs.

UPDATE: FBI busts Iranian smuggling ring on the Arizona-Mexico border.