From Behind Enemy Lines:
Drop all the charges against DNC protesters! It’s right to rebel against genocide!
For five days, Brandon Johnson’s thuggish police department has been repressing free expression in defense of the Death and Nakba Coronation (DNC). On Tuesday night, hundreds of CPD officers (including superintendent Larry Snelling) brutally attacked a Behind Enemy Lines protest arresting over 70 people, including journalists, in a state-sanctioned police riot. In defense of the genocidal Israeli consulate, the CPD beat protesters and shoved them to the ground in violent arrests. The CPD kettled protesters while ordering them to disperse in violation of its own stated policies, both issuing dispersal orders and refusing to let people disperse before making indiscriminate mass arrests, including of people on the sidewalk.
The 8/20 police riot is only one example of the repression against protesters exercising both legal free expression and absolutely justifiable protest against a genocide being funded by the US: protesters have been targeted while leaving protests including a brutal arrest on Sunday night that resulted in injury and hospitalization, and arrests during the state-sanctioned march on Monday. Arrestees were mistreated in jail including long hours long waits to see a lawyer and being denied private phone calls with attornies. CPD has punitively targeted transgender women, joking that one would be sexually assaulted, and holding another in a men’s cell.
The city of Chicago, its mayor Brandon Johnson, the CPD and Snelling have launched an all-out assault on free expression in defense of a genocide convention. Johnson claims to be a progressive mayor, and even now says he’s opposed to the genocide, while he parties in the United Center citadel with the butchers of Gaza, and his police brutally arrest and assault protesters against that genocide. His hollow political rhetoric changes nothing about which side he is on: the side of the genociders and criminals who have sent the bombs that rip human beings limb from limb. Johnson may talk like Harold Washington, but he acts like Rahm Emanuel in systematically suppressing dissent and falling in line with the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Larry Snelling has repeatedly been lying about Behind Enemy Lines to justify the Tuesday police riot that he personally directed.
The convention itself is an illegitimate celebration of genocide. The protesters, the resisters, the brave ones are on the right side of history in trying to stop that genocide. If more are arrested before the end of the convention they will be on the right side of history. Stopping this genocide means standing up for the people taking risks to stand up to the war makers and their convention. All of the charges must be dropped. It’s right to rebel against genocide!
Behind Enemy Lines
August 22, 2024
