[SuperScout]

A Mexican-American separatist website, La Voz de Aztlan, is claiming the U.S. capture of Saddam Hussein is a hoax.

The pro-Arab and viciously anti-Israeli organization also sees a spontaneous uprising of popular support for Hussein throughout Iraq ? a phenomenon unnoticed by news organizations throughout the world, including those in Arab countries.

According to the site, "extreme doubts have arisen throughout Islam that the released pictures by U.S. occupation forces of the 'captured Saddam' are of the Iraqi leader. Thousands of Iraqis, who knew Saddam, are claiming that it is one of Saddam's many known 'doubles.'"

Why would an American-based website produced by Mexican-Americans be so committed to the legacy of Saddam Hussein?

The Aztlan movement, which calls for the creation of a separate, Spanish-speaking state in North America out of much of the Southwest, gets its inspiration from Yasser Arafat's Palestinian statehood movement.

La Voz de Aztlan, or the Voice of Aztlan, called the capture of Hussein the "mother of all hoaxes."

Its website identifies Mexicans in the U.S. as "America's Palestinians." Many Mexicans see themselves as part of a transnational ethnic group known as "La Raza" ? the race. A May editorial on the website, with a dateline of "Los Angeles, Alta California," declares that "both La Raza and the Palestinians have been displaced by invaders that have utilized military means to conquer and occupy our territories."

Hussein, the group's captive hero, meanwhile, paid some $35 million in aid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

According to a survey conducted in June 2002, a healthy majority of Mexicans claim that their country rightfully owns much of the southwestern United States, while most Americans believe Washington should adopt stricter immigration standards and deploy U.S. troops along the border. The Zogby International poll found a majority of Mexicans say the U.S. Southwest "rightfully belongs to Mexico," and that Mexican citizens should be able to come into those areas freely, without U.S. permission. The poll found that 58 percent of Mexicans agree with the statement, "The territory of the United States' Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico." Zogby said 28 percent disagreed, while another 14 percent said they weren't sure.

Activists who quite literally see themselves as "America's Palestinians" are gearing up a movement to carve out of the southwestern United States ? a region including all of Bush's home state of Texas ? a sovereign Hispanic state called the Republica del Norte.

"There are great similarities between the political and economic condition of the Palestinians in occupied Palestine and that of La Raza in the southwest United States," explains an editorial in La Voz de Aztlan in Los Angeles, the city seen as the future capital of the new Hispanic state ? much like Jerusalem is seen by Palestinian Arabs as their capital.

The editorial goes on to draw analogies between the Arab uprising in Israel and gang violence in Los Angeles. It's the same thing, the activists claim. This is not crime and punishment, according to La Raza activists, this is the birth of an independence movement by young Hispanics.

"The similarities are many," says the editorial. "The takeover of our respective lands by foreign elements occurred 100 years apart. For La Raza, it happened in 1848 when Mexico lost the southwest at the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. For the Palestinians, it occurred in 1948 when the Zionist Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum and signed the 'Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel' on the day in which the British Mandate over Palestine expired."

[Editor's Notes: now we can add another group to the Practitioners of Paranoia, aka the Democrat party. For the Fence Sitters, if there are really any out there: can you trust your country's security and sovereignty to them?]