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Transcript below:
My name is Em and my partner Juno is one of the Moog 4. Their trial starts 2 weeks today on June 4th at Birmingham Crown Court. They face a single charge of criminal damage. At least that’s what the jury will be told.
Maybe you’ve heard about their case, maybe you haven’t. Admittedly, they were arrested during a busy summer. You’ve heard of the Filton 25, you’ve heard of the Brize Norton 5, you’ve heard about the proscription of Palestine Action, you’ve heard about the hunger strikers. You need to hear about this case too.
Moog supply parts to the global F-35 programme and they also supply parts for the M-346 aircraft — specifically, flight actuators. These are essential parts that no other company makes. To suspend Moog’s export licenses would greatly hamper their facilitation of genocide, but this has not happened. Although the UK likes to bang on about the licenses it has suspended, this is basically for goods that Israel can just go buy on Amazon. On that front alone, the UK government have misled the public. But there’s so much more to tell you.
The M-346 is a trainer aircraft — it trains would-be Israeli fighter jet pilots, who have carried out much of the destruction of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. It’s a hi-tech trainer aircraft that makes training pilots a quick process. The Israeli air force itself, always prone to brag, claims that they can have pilots go from training to live deployment is as little as six months. That’s the same amount of time that the Moog 4 have already spent in prison. How many new pilots were trained by Israel during that time?
The UK government knows all about this. In an internal briefing written by the Foreign Office, they conclude that the M-436 “facilitates the development of an offensive capability”. In their own words, the M-346 facilities genocide, but they have spent more time prevaricating about what the words “facilitation” and “genocide” mean rather than doing their due diligence to halt even the risk of the slaughter of Palestinians, as is their duty under international law.
Chris Bryant MP was asked about all of this during a select committee meeting. He said “the assessment is that the training of an aircraft pilot on such equipment would take so long that they would not be among the people who would be engaged in fighter combat in Gaza”. This is also misleading. The briefing Bryant received on the M-346 does not mention anything about the time taken to train pilots, and if he’d done his own research he’d know it does not take long at all, so it appears Bryant was simply making this up on the spot.
The only argument that Bryant’s briefing made was that, since these trainer aircraft are not used over Gaza themselves, because they have no direct combat utility, then exports can continue. This contradicts the government’s own assessment of the M-346 facilitating an offensive capability.
Moog ship their M-346 parts directly to Israel. We know this because we have literally the receipts. Last year Declassified reported that they had records of 10 shipments going from Wolverhampton to Israel. Now, we have a whole lot more. We know that Moog has done everything in its power to keep its shipping routes open, with the full support of the UK government and its courts. For instance, Moog took out an injunction last year that makes any disruption outside the factory illegal, and changed their shipping patterns numerous times. If they did this to avoid scrutiny, they probably shouldn’t have started shipping parts via Belgium, which does have a full arms embargo on Israel. Caught in the act, a criminal investigation has been opened in Belgium into Moog’s activities.
This hardly comes as a surprise. We already know Moog is flagrant in disrespecting the law; in 2024, they were fined almost $2m for bribing Indian officials to acquire public tenders. This is a company that will do anything to maintain its profits, with no concern for ethics or human life.
Despite all of this, Moog are not on trial or under investigation — at least not in this country. The UK government seeks to convict 4 people of trying to do what they should have done two years ago, which is stop Moog’s facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
We have a lot more questions going into this trial. Given that 4 of the Filton 6 may be sentenced as terrorists for their direct action at an Elbit Systems factory in 2024, we are asking ourselves whether our loved ones will face the same repressive treatment. There is a clear pattern in this country showing that the UK wants to designate protestors as terrorists, when all they have done is try to uphold international law and save Palestinian lives. Many of them have likely succeeded in doing the latter, our 4 included. Under their scaremongering use of the Terrorism Act, which is having a chilling effect across this country, what is really happening is that the moral conduct of concerned citizens is being outlawed by a government that would rather sit on its hands and rake in profits. They will brutalise anyone who puts human life before their pockets. We cannot allow this to continue.
Come to Birmingham Crown Court from June 4th and rally for the Moog 4. The trial is scheduled to last for three weeks. You can use that time to let this government know that it cannot continue to shirk its responsibilities and persecute people of conscience. The Moog 4 are the best of us, and they deserve our support.