Nearly six months after deploying the killer cops in the Chicago PD to evict the campus Gaza encampment, in the same school year that it has been repressing protests for Palestine, keeping its quad closed, and allowing a returned IDF killer to brazenly parade around campus, DePaul University has decided to ban Behind Enemy Lines from it’s campuses. 

This cowardly, clownish ban is a vein attempt to keep Behind Enemy Lines from agitating the students at DePaul, and it is part of the nationwide repression against people speaking and acting for Palestine, especially on campuses. DePaul joins the long list of Universities who have punitively acted to keep students in line: a student evicted from his dorm at the University of Chicago, students at Penn who had their off campus housing raided by campus pigs in tactical gear,  students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who were arrested by their own campus police and are now facing felony charges. 

Behind Enemy Lines has been regularly organizing on the DePaul campus this fall, our activities have included distributing posters and stickers that say “No votes for genocide!”, setting up a table, and mostly handing out flyers and talking to students about the genocide and their responsibility to step up resistance. Our latest flyer was issued after the returned IOF solider Max Long had been parading around the campus proudly proclaiming his participation in the genocide. DePaul has the audacity to claim that Behind Enemy Lines is inciting violence (a spurious and ridiculous lie) by handing out flyers, while it’s standing on the side of genocide.

What are DePaul’s values? DePaul claims that it abides by “Vincentian Values”, “promoting peaceful, just, and equitable solutions to social and environmental challenges,” and “guide our students to work for the common good and the building of a just, equitable, and sustainable society.” How does censoring the distribution of literature, banning organizations from campus, and siding with a genocide live up to those values? As the Director of Public Safety at a Catholic University, we’d like Robert Wachowski to answer how his work as professional censor on behalf of a genocide lines up with those values. And if he and the chickenshit leadership at DePaul have any Thomas Aquinas on their bookshelves, how they understand his exhortation: 
“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.” 

What is DePaul so afraid of? The unfortunate reality is that after last springs student uprising, the campuses in Chicago and nationwide, have gone quiet.  As part of our responsibility to the people of Palestine, Behind Enemy Lines has been doing everything we can to reverse this rotten state of affairs, because we believe that nothing is more intolerable than business as usual during genocide. This craven decision by the morally vacuous leadership at DePaul is confirmation that we’re right. The flyer that led to our banning ended this way, a call that remains true: 

“​​​​​​​Students here at DePaul and across the country have a choice: play it safe, keep your head down, and pretend that you don’t live in a a country that is actively participating in a modern-day holocaust. Or do what students did last spring, and be brave and take risks. If you go along with this wave of repression and don’t challenge it, what else will you go along with? If you want to figure out how to rebuild opposition to the genocide, fight back against repression, and get fucking dangerous, hit us up.”