Protesters Denounce Lockheed Martin’s Genocide for Profit in Victoria

When I heard of a family-friendly pro-Palestinian protest at Lockheed Martin's office, I expected a couple dozen well-behaved folks picketing in silence on the side of the road. I was in for a huge surprise.

About 125 protesters occupied the parking lot of Lockheed Martin’s office in Esquimalt to denounce its profiting off Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and more recently its graphic campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The event was organised by mothers and promoted as family-friendly, and indeed several people brought their toddlers to the facility’s parking lot. It unfolded in a blunter manner than one would expect from that description, however, as none in the crowd were in the mood for a well-behaved intervention. More about that in a moment.

Once again I couldn’t frame everyone into the picture…

… although I wouldn’t leave “Babies Not Bombs” out of the picture, of course.

A sign I made at the Torch Song Cafe the night prior to the protest, at an affiliated sign and banner making event. For once I wanted to be more of a protester than a blogger, so I even volunteered for banner duty today. Sorry, that means less pictures and recordings, and no videos of speeches.

Organised by Mamas for Gaza. Don’t fuck with the Moms.

Multiple mothers came forward to speak, and while their speech was polite, their words were incisive. Lockheed Martin was labelled a war crime and genocide profiteer for providing arms to the so-called Israel Defence Forces (IDF), including thousands of tonnes of bombs meant to be mounted on fighter jets; hardly the kind of weapon to take on a million defenceless civilians, much less rescuing hostages.

The building is technically a federal government facility, so we could get away with protesting on the property. They wouldn’t dare calling the police. Although they might have if they’d known what would come next.

They described conditions on the ground that drove health care for mothers and newborns in particular back to pre-industrial ages, where mothers were far more likely to die of childbirth and complications thereof than most casual observers in developed nations care to remember. To say nothing of the displacement by raining bombs part. Or hospitals struggling to keep premature newborns alive without incubators for lack of electricity. In short, they described a quintessential aspect of genocide: the engineered killing of newborns and expecting mothers, all on Western taxpayer’s dime in military aid to Israel.

Volunteers then tentatively read names from a nonexhaustive list of Palestinians killed since October 7, which still included over 6000 entries spanning across roughly 200 pages. Even an hour on, they had barely made a dent into that list, which included many victims not even one year old.

Here’s the list. Volunteers could only read through a small portion of it.

The protesters, however, would not limit themselves to spreading their message with words that scatter into the wind as soon as they were spoken. They also painted the facades of the facility with bloody hands, and littered those walls with posters of children killed during the ongoing massacre, presumably by bombs manufactured by Lockheed Martin. By the time they dispersed, the building was an utter mess of condemning messages.

Moms resorting to vandalism to carry out their message? That just shows how toxic our government’s stance is. Trudeau won’t emerge from this fiasco with his reputation intact, regardless of the outcome.

This is the organisers’ idea of a family-friendly event: smearing their target with fake blood. I’m cool with that.

Sticker signs have more lasting power than words spoken to the convert. Especially those which accuse their target audience of murdering kids.

Fuck your signs and fuck your rules. An activist did climb on the building, by the way, to reach all the way to the second floor with bloody palms. Take that, security.

I had a conversation with a fellow protester on my way back, at the bus stop. We’re both of the opinion that targeted direct action events like this have more of an impact than rallying at the Legislature every weekend while no public officials are in attendance. In this case, we could imagine what kind of conversation engineers would have at the dinner table tonight, when they told their families how their day went. I wonder whether they can imagine their own kids being shooting targets for the bombs they build; if so, there’s an obvious avenue for them to show their solidarity to the Palestinian people, and their humanity to their next-door neighbours.