Ritchie Torres, the congressman for District 12 in the South Bronx, made a name for himself by being one of New York City’s most Zionist congresspeople. He campaigns on aggressive and unconditional support for Israel, slanders pro-Palestine protestors as “terrorists” and compares them to Jim Crow lynchers, and cuts deals with real estate developers and the NYPD to sell out his district in the Bronx (which suffers from poverty and the terrible conditions in public housing). Behind Enemy Lines is talking with people in his congressional district about what he has been doing (carrying out and justifying mass slaughter) and what he hasn’t been doing (listening to his constituents), and are working to organize people with a righteous bone to pick against him and against all corrupt politicians.

Ritchie is the epitome of bourgeois identity politics – he’s Congress’s first openly gay, Afro-Latino politician. None of that means anything to the people in Gaza, murdered by weapons that he begs to send more of, or the people in the South Bronx who he neglects in favor of jetting off to more galas in Tel Aviv. We don’t care if the genocidal warmongers in Congress voting to drop more bombs on are straight and white or gay and Black; we won’t let the rabid dogs of American imperialism hide under a rainbow flag.

Make no mistake, everyone in the United States government is guilty of genocide and war crimes, and deserves nothing less than a trial at the Hague. Ritchie Torres wouldn’t be any less of an enemy of the Palestinian people, or the proletariat of the South Bronx, if he were a little bit quieter about being a Zionist. But when we let politicians like him get away with saying things like “nobody in my district has a problem with my support for Israel”, when that couldn’t be further from the truth, we send a message that Ritchie should get off scot-free for the hand that he’s played in carrying out, propagandizing, and normalizing a genocide.

This campaign is inspired, in name and in goal, by the call in Puerto Rico in 2019 – Ricky Renuncia! – when governer Ricardo Rosselló was ousted by half a million Puerto Ricans protesting his racism and corruption, demanding he step down. When protests look like something other than the state-sanctioned parades we’ve come to expect, we know that they can scare the shit out of politicians, and out of the genocidal empire that they’re a part of. Mobilizing the masses against Ritchie Torres is what we’re working hard in the South Bronx every week to do.