La Raza shouldn't get federal tax dollars

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Top White House adviser Karl Rove traveled to Los Angeles last week to pay homage to the anti-immigration enforcement lobbying group for Latinos: the National Council of La Raza.

"La Raza" is Spanish for "The Race."

It's bad enough the White House lent its prestige to The Race's annual conference. But did you know the Bush administration has forked over millions of federal tax dollars to The Race?

According to U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., The Race snapped up $15.2 million in federal grants last year, and more than $30 million since 1996. Undisclosed amounts went to get-out-the-vote efforts supporting La Raza political positions. The U.S. Department of Education funneled nearly $8 million in taxpayer grants to the group for a nationwide charter schools initiative.

Among The Race's most infamous government-funded charter schools is La Academia Semillas del Pueblo, the Los Angeles public school that teaches "Aztec math" (ancient dot math is the new math) and the Mexican indigenous language of "Nahuatl." The ethnic separatist principal of the school, Marcos Aguilar, told a sympathetic UCLA interviewer:

"We don't want to drink from a white water fountain. . . . We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the white way, the American way, the neoliberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."

That's the tip of the iceberg. I found dozens of other publicly subsidized charter schools sponsored by The Race and funded with our money, including:

Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz. Who needs the three R's? At Mexicayotl, it's all about the three M's: me, me, me. The school's program is "structured and developed around the concepts of identity, culture and language." Its second mission: Supporting local ethnic lobbying efforts "to right social injustices by educating the community and helping create social change." Under "greatest achievements," the school's Web site lists its visit from Rigoberta Menchu (the Marxist academic fraud from Guatemala who lied her way to a Nobel Peace Prize).

The Dolores Huerta Preparatory High School in Pueblo, Colo. It's named after the far-Left Latina labor union activist who recently railed that "Republicans hate Latinos," praised illegal alien marchers and screeched that "We didn't cross the borders, the borders crossed us" in a hate-filled tirade before Arizona students.

Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn. Board of Directors member Louis Mendoza, an activist Chicano Studies professor, pushed the school to lobby for the federal DREAM Act (providing in-state tuition discounts to illegal alien students not available to legal nonresidents).

Not so moderate

The White House will tell you that the National Council of The Race is a "moderate," mainstream civil rights group. But there's nothing "moderate" about The Race's advocacy of driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens. Or its opposition to strengthening security for identity documents or all-out war on House Republicans' border security and enforcement-first bill passed last December.

President Bush pays lip service to immigration enforcement and assimilation while the White House sends Rove to make nice with the separatist leaders of The Race and the Department of Education showers our tax dollars on radical "Reconquista" schools. It doesn't add up.

Unless, of course, you're using Aztec math.
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