One Chicago protest group issues a call to “make it great like ‘68” and “shut down the DNC”

In contrast to the pro-Palestinian protesters who are planning what they call a “family-friendly march” during next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, another group of demonstrators here promises a “militant” approach to the DNC — and expects police to clash violently with protesters.

In one post on social media, that group urges “students and youth” to come to Chicago during the DNC to “take police beatings and arrests” in an effort to “shut down the DNC for Gaza.”

The group, which calls itself Behind Enemy Lines, wrote recently, “Make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back to school Fall fashion.”

Behind Enemy Lines says pro-Palestinian activists have faced repression. “But have you thrown down with the Chicago police yet?” the group wrote in a post on its website.

The group also was advertising a protest Tuesday at the Israeli consulate in downtown Chicago under the slogan of “make it great like ‘68” — a reference to the Democratic convention held here when police infamously attacked protesters opposed to the Vietnam War.

Behind Enemy Lines has opened a temporary office on Chicago’s Northwest Side, decorated with posters bearing slogans such as “Stop Killer Kamala” and “Fight Back for Gaza!” In an interview there this week, a spokesperson told WBEZ that the posts on the group’s website and Instagram account should not be taken as threats.

“We’re not calling for violence or planning on anything illegal, but we think that there’s ways for people to protest that do go beyond business as usual,” said the spokesperson, who asked not to be named for fear of being targeted by law enforcement and the potential professional stigma of being associated with the protests.

He added, “Civil disobedience is certainly one form of protest that’s important and valid, and I hope to see lots of it in this coming week.”

Although ABC7 Chicago reported earlier this month that Behind Enemy Lines was part of a “threat assessment” conducted by Chicago police ahead of the DNC, the group’s spokesperson predicted any physical harm during the protests would be the result of law enforcement aggression.

“It’s not the protesters who are going to harm residents of Chicago or surveille their children, right?” the spokesperson said. “If people are exercising not just their constitutional rights to free expression, but what I think is a moral obligation to confront this convention, I think they should do that, and they should stand up for themselves. And if there’s violence, that will come not from us, but from the police.”

Earlier this week, CPD Supt. Larry Snelling said of demonstrators, “We’re not going to allow you to riot,” and he vowed that officers would immediately crack down on “violent actors” and vandals.

A coalition of about 150 activist groups supporting Palestinians, known collectively as March on the DNC, are working with authorities on a permitted march and fought in court to determine the route for what they say will be tens of thousands of protesters. But the spokesperson for Behind Enemy Lines says they are “not a member of the coalition.”

“We don’t think there’s any reason to get a permit,” the spokesperson said. “We think you have the right and moral obligation to hold these events and not be in constant coordination and back and forth to City Hall and the police to do something that’s perfectly legal and morally justifiable.”

March on the DNC participants have agreed they will not engage in civil disobedience or any such “escalations” so that the event will be safe for everyone who may attend, said Hatem Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the coalition and national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network.

But he added, “The position of the coalition in general is that we recognize there will be a diversity of tactics in all protest movements. Our mass march will not have a diversity of tactics. If it happens in other spaces, by other organizations, we are not going to criticize it. We believe in tactics like civil disobedience, but there’s a time, place and conditions for those things.”

Behind Enemy Lines demonstrators have already begun to take their message across the city, including peaceful activism on CTA trains, according to posts on social media, and a series of four “neighborhood speakout” sessions are scheduled for Saturday.

The rhetoric from Behind Enemy Lines caught the attention of Jared Holt, a Chicago-based senior researcher on hate and extremism for the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Holt said these groups clearly had decided that the approach of the other pro-Palestinian march organizers was “not radical enough to affect any sort of real change or to strike fear in the hearts of the Democrats that are in town for the convention, and they have opted to establish sort of their own activism.”

Holt noted that the public statements from Behind Enemy Lines do not openly discuss violence, but he said “escalation between protesters and police is always a possibility.”

He said he expected “potentially major acts of vandalism and more actions like blocking roads that aim to be more disruptive and garner more attention on the issue than they feel a sort of standard style protest march is capable of doing.”

As for the potential of right-wing extremist organizations demonstrating in Chicago this coming week, such as those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol, a director at the Midwest office of the Anti Defamation League said they’ve seen no evidence yet that they’ll be here in any significant manner.

Holt, the researcher on extremism, said right-wing groups have become more covert after so many of their members were convicted for their roles in the 2021 riots in Washington.

“The right-wing extremists have been very antagonistic towards pro-Palestine protesters, so there’s always a potential that some of that protest activity could attract radical people from the opposite side of the political spectrum,” Holt said. “But at this time, we can only go off of what we actually observed.”

Other supporters of former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump do, however, plan to be in Chicago to engage in protests of their own during the DNC. That includes Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, who announced Thursday he would be in the city, at an unspecified place “outside the DNC,” while hosting a live-streamed “election summit” throughout the convention.

Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team.