Our response to yesterday’s so-called hearings

Behind Enemy Lines played a small role in yesterday’s comically absurd congressional hearings, when DePaul University president Robert Manuel prostrated himself before the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee. Manuel repeated the outrageous slander that his ban on Behind Enemy Lines had anything to do with fighting antisemitism, while celebrating the imposition of new repressive measures and crackdowns on student protests. While Manuel is no idiot, he is a coward who made no mention of the reason for the campus protest in the first place—the modern-day holocaust that is being funded by the criminals that he was testifying in front of.

Behind Enemy Lines was brought up again by Congressman Rick Allen, who is clearly an idiot. Allen, while peppering his “questions” with references to his ultra-reactionary religious views, claimed that BEL had trespassed on DePaul property and harassed Jewish students. This is a slanderous lie by an unhinged, theocratic freak. The fact that people like Rick Allen are anywhere near the levers of power is a damning indictment of this decrepit empire. More disturbing was Manuel’s answer: that he had spoken with the Chicago Police Department and the FBI about restricting the entirely protected First Amendment activities of BEL.

Here’s the reality: this hearing was a joke and a charade. Last spring’s encampments were an entirely justified response to the US-Israel orgy of mass slaughter directed against the Palestinian people of Gaza and the region. The biggest criticism of the encampments and student activism since is that it hasn’t gone far enough in challenging repression or disrupting business as usual. Here’s the reality: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and the people of Palestine have a right to resist murder, displacement, and occupation.

While supposedly liberal institutions like DePaul University are bending over backwards to appease the witch-burners in Congress and the modern-day brownshirts like the Chicago Jewish Alliance, the United States of America is an active and willing participant in a genocide. While Congress is cosplaying McCarthyism, US-made bombs land on children sleeping in a supposed “safe zone”. While Manuel is betraying the values of Pope Francis, US bombs are slaughtering sheltering migrants in Yemen.

All of this comes as the US and Israel are openly plotting to carry out a final solution in Gaza. In the face of the unimaginable horrors that the United States has perpetuated on the people of Palestine, and the new atrocities it is openly plotting we can only think of one response: get fucking dangerous.

It is right to rebel against genocide!