I'm not sure what you changed to make it work, if spelling strip correctly didn't solve it, because mIRC defaults to matching upper and lower case versions of the same word. It's possible the %enemy just *looks* empty because $1 may have been only a color code. You could make sure $1 is not empty by beginning your event handler with code that changes $1 into a version of the original message without having colors:
tokenize 32 $strip($1-)
