For the five days of the Death and Nakba Coronation (DNC) Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling supervised the intimidation, mass arrest, and beating of protesters against the genocide convention happening in Chicago. Protesters faced brutality and arrest even at the permitted marches that collaborated with the police and deployed their own peace police. After personally supervising a 1968-style police riot at a Behind Enemy Lines protest on 8/20, Snelling spent the next several days lying and slandering BEL to justify his crackdown on free expression. 

The many lies of Larry Snelling: 

Snelling claims that protesters came from out of town with intent to destroy the city. The reality is, the two most dangerous criminals in Chicago last week were the war criminals safely ensconced in the citadel of the United Center, and the school bullies with guns that Snelling unleashed on protesters. Behind Enemy Lines was started in Chicago, and has been proudly and loudly going out all over the city for more than six months agitating against the genocide convention that Snelling was so proud to defend. We were proud to welcome other brave people from all over the US with the righteous intention to confront the genocide convention. 

Snelling claims that protesters refused to leave the 8/20 protest and were given ample opportunity to leave. In reality hundreds of militarized cops, acting directly under Snelling’s orders, kettled the protest, at the same time issuing dispersal orders and refusing to let people leave. Protesters who directly stated to Snelling’s cops that they were trying to leave and walk to a nearby CTA station were not allowed to leave and still arrested. 

Pinocchio Snelling repeatedly told the media that his crackdown on free expression was necessary because our protest was unpermitted, and because flags were burnt. We’re not sure whether Snelling failed his high school civics class or he’s been a cop so long he just prodigiously violates peoples rights, but we can provide an update. You don’t get to stage a police riot because protesters didn’t get a permit, that’s free expression. And flag burning has been legal in the US since 1989 (thank you Joey Johnson). 

Perhaps the biggest lie of all is the claim that what transpired during the DNC was an example of “constitutional policing.” Over the course of 5 days, protesters were beaten with batons, thrown to the ground and dragged on the concrete, shoved against fences. Multiple protesters required hospitalization after being brutally arrested, and several journalists were arrested in clear violations of press freedom. One transgender women was threatened with sexual assault by the CPD, and another was held for hours in a men’s cell. Arrestees waited hours for private conversations with legal council and access to their phone calls. In the specially provisioned precinct for mass arrests, the protesters detained didn’t have access to clean drinking water. Snelling says to stop talking about 1968 – Sorry superintendent- you’re a brutal cop just like the CPD was in ’68. And we’re on the right side of history, just like the protesters in ’68 were. 

Side by side with Snelling’s slander have been false and unsubstantiated allegations—from online Leftists, a few Leftist organizations, and probably some undercover cops—that Behind Enemy Lines assaulted protesters and protest marshals at the Monday, 8/19 March on the DNC. BEL volunteers rightfully verbally called out the protest marshals—the volunteer cops in hi-vis vests—for their disgusting collaboration with the CPD in preventing protesters from confronting the DNC. When protest marshals pushed protesters, including but not limited to BEL volunteers, towards the police, people rightfully refused to be pushed towards the police. However, as all video evidence of the 8/19 protest shows, no BEL volunteers did anything at the March on the DNC that could conceivably fit the legal definition of assault.

Anyone making these slanderous claims that Behind Enemy Lines assaulted people at the 8/19 March on the DNC is aiding and abetting police repression and potential prosecution of protesters. In particular, we have to call out the US Palestinian Community Network, the apparently misnamed Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Anti-War Committee – Chicago, and Students for a Democratic Society – UIC for putting out a joint statement making these false and unsubstantiated assault allegations—at roughly the same time as BEL’s 8/20 protest was being assaulted by the police, no less. We call on these four organizations to make a public retraction of their false and unsubstantiated assault allegations and to cease and desist their slander. And we have to ask them: are you on the side of those arrested during the DNC protests, or are you on the side of CPD Superintendent Snelling?