The question of whether Depleted Uranium is being used in Libya has been a sensitive issue from the outset – and an issue raised by alternative media from the onset of NATO bombing.

Although DU weapons – if used – would represent a small component of the vast arsenal deployed by US, UK and French forces in this war, Depleted Uranium is a matter of particular sensitivity. That’s especially true on the ‘green’ side of politics.

9,000 bombing sorties later (plus Tomahawk missiles, drones - and now attack helicopters), do the Australian Greens REALLY still support NATO's "moves to protect the beleaguered people" of Libya?

Here in Australia, for example, the national leadership of the Australian Greens rushed to support NATO’s attacks on Libya back in March – ducking questions from the public about whether DU was being used in the conflict.

Since then, the leadership has not, to my knowledge, wavered in its support for NATO’s bombing extravaganza, despite a rising chorus of anguished appeals from the public. The media don’t seem to have quizzed the Greens on the subject, but given the Australian media shares the same pro-war agenda, why would they bother?

Yet it would be hard indeed for Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown and his Deputy Christine Milne to withstand party anger and ‘stay the course’ on Libya – if it turned out the military action they’d supported, supposedly to ‘protect civilians’ – was in reality poisoning the North African environment with highly persistent radioactive toxins.

It seems the Australian Greens Senators and their staffers can make mental contortions to justify why bombing Gadhafi’s grandchildren, or a Tripoli school for disabled children, or a group of religious leaders assembled for a peacemaking initiative, or Libyan hospitals, are all acceptable ways of “protecting civilians”. But depositing DU in the dusty atmosphere of Libya? Now surely that’s too much for any conservationist to shrug off?

For the most part, spokespeople for NATO and the individual aggressor nations have avoided giving straight answers to the very occasional questions they’ve had about the use of DU in Libya. The closest to a real answer I’ve noticed so far was the response received by the valiant lone Green Party MP in the British Parliament, Dr Caroline Lucas, back in mid-April. UK Defence Minister Dr Liam Fox replied for the British Government:

Caroline Lucas: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what discussions he has had with his counterparts in (a) the US Administration and (b) the governments of other countries forming the coalition for military action in Libya on policy on the use of depleted uranium weapons; and how that policy (a) is applied to and (b) will apply in operations in Libya.

Liam Fox: The Government’s policy is that depleted uranium (DU) can be used within weapons. It is not prohibited under current or likely future international agreements. The UK’s armed forces use all munitions in accordance with international humanitarian law. It would be quite wrong to deny our serving personnel a legitimate and effective capability. The only DU munition in service with our armed forces is the Charm 3 antitank round fired from the Challenger 2 tank. With no deployed ground forces it follows that none of the weapons supplied to UK armed forces for uses over Libya contain DU. Other nations may choose to use DU munitions fired from aircraft guns against armoured targets if they have that capability but that is a choice for them alone to make.

Note that Dr Fox explicitly said: “The only DU munition in service with our (British) armed forces is the Charm 3 antitank round fired from the Challenger 2 tank”

What then to make of the following report on Iran’s Press TV, in which independent scientist and radiation expert Leuren Moret said:

The U.S. and the British as of March 21st had fired a 112 Tomahawk missiles, those are from Navy ships and this was fired at Libya. The warhead in the Tomahawk missile is 360 kilos of Depleted uranium so in those 112 Tomahawk missiles that would have been 40, 312 Kilos of Depleted Uranium

Listen to the interview with Dr Moret here

Leuren Moret

I should note that the current use of DU in Tomahawk missiles is disputed – as are the long-term environmental dangers posed by Depleted Uranium. Plenty of experts deny both. This recent article by Professor Massimo Zucchetti  - Cruise missiles with depleted uranium on Libya: A first assessment of environmental impact and health - conveys some of the complexity of the debate. Above all, it’s complex because of the shocking lack of honesty and transparency on the part of so many governmental officials who deal with the subject.

If Leuren Morret is correct, more than 40 tonnes of DU have already been dropped on Libya. Professor Zucchetti’s worst case scenario posits a tonnage ten times as great – 400 tonnes!

By basic standards of common decency – if not the mangled convolutions of what currently passes for international law – dropping ANY amount of this appalling stuff on Libya is a major crime against humanity’s future. Then there’s the little question of whether the UK Secretary of State for Defence lied to the British Parliament. Lying to Parliament is still regarded as a sacking offence for Ministers – even in this day and age.

Let’s hope Dr Lucas follows up in the House of Commons. If Fox lied to Parliament about Britain’s non-use of DU he should quit.

Of course, the British Government may well continue to lie about DU. It has a long history of doing so  - as does the USA. The pattern of systematic deceit was reported in Australia’s mainstream media years ago – see Washington’s Secret Nuclear War.

Here’s a brief extract from the FAQs on the website of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons

There are doubts over exactly which conflicts DU has been used in. This is because governments have often initially denied using DU. Governments have admitted so far that DU was used on a large scale by the US and the UK in the Gulf War in 1991, subsequently in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo NATO, and again in the war in Iraq by the US and the UK in 2003.

Could it be that Leuren Moret is one of these flakey characters who inhabit the fringes of serious debate because they play fast and lose with facts? Her detractors probably say so – and certainly she doesn’t get much coverage in the western mainstream media.

But commentators like Ms Moret, who’ve been around a while, give warnings and make predictions that history records. One way of gauging their credibility is to refer to what they’ve said in the past. So I turned with interest to the Japan Times, one major newspaper that does have an article by Moret available on-line. This is how it described her:

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory on the Yucca Mountain Project, and became a whistle-blower in 1991 by reporting science fraud on the project and at Livermore. She is an independent and international radiation specialist, and the Environmental Commissioner in the city of Berkeley, Calif. She has visited Japan four times to work with Japanese citizens, scientists and elected officials on radiation and peace issues.

That happened to be Moret’s byline for an article published by the Japan Times back in 2004. The title? Japan’s deadly game of nuclear roulette. Here’s a poignant extract:

Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.

The Japanese archipelago is located on the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, a large active volcanic and tectonic zone ringing North and South America, Asia and island arcs in Southeast Asia. The major earthquakes and active volcanoes occurring there are caused by the westward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates leading to subduction under Asia.

Fukushima Daiichi Explosion, March 2011

Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world. It was extreme pressures and temperatures, resulting from the violent plate movements beneath the seafloor, that created the beautiful islands and volcanoes of Japan.

Nonetheless, like many countries around the world — where General Electric and Westinghouse designs are used in 85 percent of all commercial reactors — Japan has turned to nuclear power as a major energy source. In fact the three top nuclear-energy countries are the United States, where the existence of 118 reactors was acknowledged by the Department of Energy in 2000, France with 72 and Japan, where 52 active reactors were cited in a December 2003 Cabinet White Paper.

The 52 reactors in Japan — which generate a little over 30 percent of its electricity — are located in an area the size of California, many within 150 km of each other and almost all built along the coast where seawater is available to cool them.

However, many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently. The periodicity of major earthquakes in Japan is less than 10 years. There is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan — the third-ranked country in the world for nuclear reactors.

“I think the situation right now is very scary,” says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. “It’s like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode.”

Of course, the warnings of Moret and the scientists whose views she reported were ignored at the time. Media-promoted ‘experts’ – people we are expected to take seriously – assured everyone who asked that safety standards in Japan’s nuclear industry were impeccable. (And after all, General Electric does own a major US TV network).

Senator Christine Milne on Libya, ABC TV QandA, 21st March 2011

Truth has always been the first casualty in war – and it was a casualty of the nuclear industry from the get-go. When war and the nuclear industry combine in a death embrace – as in the cases of atomic weapons and Depleted Uranium –  official spin goes into hyperdrive.

That’s one very sound reason why the environment movement – and its political offshoot, the Greens Party – have a long and consistent record of opposition to (a) war and (b) nuclear energy.

Bob Brown, Christine Milne and MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt clearly get the second part of that proposition.

But on foreign affairs, the leadership seem to inhabit a make-believe world which has more to do with Enid Blyton stories than the reality of a hyper-militarised western world, hijacked by people who are utterly ruthless and to whom lying about matters of life and death is simply routine.

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EXTRAS

More Leuren Moret: Attack on Iran would result in India feeling nuked (Feb 2007)

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Russia Today interview with Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy in Focus (April 2011)

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Extract from: Rise in birth deformities blamed on Allies’ deadly weaponry

By Nigel Morris (The Independent, UK) 13 May 2004

The number of babies born deformed and children suffering leukaemia have soared because of the “deadly legacy” of depleted uranium shells used by British and American forces in Iraq, human rights campaigners claimed yesterday.

Releasing details of health problems and human rights violations suffered by Iraqi children in the past year, they claim the country’s youngsters faced a worse existence today than they did under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

Depleted uranium was widely used by Allied forces to penetrate Iraqi tank armour in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and again last year.
Opponents claim the dust it releases upon impact is rapidly absorbed into the body, causing an upsurge of serious health problems inherited by Iraqi children during the past 13 years from their parents.

Caroline Lucas speaks at an anti-war demonstration, Trafalgar Square London, 2003

Caroline Lucas, a Green Party Euro-MP who recently visited Basra, said doctors there had told her that the number of children born with severe deformities, such as shortened limbs or eye defects, had increased sevenfold since 1991. In addition they were treating several new cases of leukaemia every week – before 1991 the condition was very rare.

“Women in Basra are afraid to become pregnant because there are so many deformed babies,” she said. “We are leaving a deadly legacy for generations to come.”

She made the claims at the launch in London of a new charity, Child Victims of War (CVW), to help Iraqi youngsters “innocently suffering malnutrition, disease, disability and psychological trauma”.

The amount of depleted uranium used by coalition forces in the two Gulf Wars is not known, but some estimates suggest it was 300 tons in 1991 and five times as much last year.

CVW says the number of Iraqi babies born with serious deformities has risen from 3.04 per thousand in 1991 to 22.19 per thousand in 2001. Babies born with Downs Syndrome have increased nearly fivefold and there had been a rash of cases of previously little-known eye problems.

The Ministry of Defence insists depleted uranium poses a “minimal” risk to civilians….

A couple of years ago an old friend visited. We chatted about mutual friends and recent interests. I talked a little about some of the topics I’ve found intriguing in recent years, some of which are discussed in this blog.

After a while, he asked what I thought about crop circles. I paused, surprised by the question and unsure what to say.

Of course, I’d heard of the crop circle phenomenon before – a long time back. I remembered press reports of crop circles mysteriously appearing, mainly in in south-western England, more than a quarter century ago. It’s predominantly – but not entirely – been an English phenomenon. But crop circles rarely feature in Australian news and I had to admit I just hadn’t thought about the topic for years – and really knew very little about it.

Over the next couple of hours we surfed some of the websites that discuss this remarkable phenomenon.

An elaborate Crop Circle at Woodborough Hill, Wiltshire, August 2009 (© Lucy Pringle)

I’m not sure what I thought he’d show me. Perhaps I’d expected to be confronted with photographs that could all be easily explained as the work of local pranksters? In any event, as we looked at more and more photos and read some of the accompanying text, he had no difficulty making his main point: a subtantial number of crop circles cannot be explained as the handiwork of amateur pranksters. That’s certainly an explanation for some of the crop circles, for sure; but the phenomenon as a whole goes beyond that.

Some circles have been the work of drunks in boots.Plenty of hoaxes – more or less sophisticated – have been acknowledged as such afterwards by the pranksters responsible. But there are also many designs that regularly yet unpredictably turn up in famers’ fields cannot be explained in this way.

Over the years, the designs have become increasingly complex. Since the 1990s, ‘crop circles’ has been a rather inaccurate term. Some of the designs are quite breathe-taking. There are cases when elaborate patterns have appeared, overnight, in fields directly adjacent to busy main roads. An example is a design that appeared next to Silbury Hill, adjacent to the A40. It’s a road that carries traffic at night. Drivers would surely have spotted a troupe of pranksters in their headlights as they drove past – but that didn’t happen. It never seems to have happened.

I became intrigued. This truly is a phenomenon that demands explanation. What on earth has been going on?

Of course, plenty of folk believe the answer lies way beyond this earth. Crop circles have long been associated, in the public mind, with UFOs and extra-terrestrial visitors.

If they are right, we now a lot more about these ‘extra-terrrestrials’ than we did when I was a teenager in south west England, way back in the 1960s.

• First, we know “extra-terrestrials” were to begin making large numbers of patterns in fields from the late 1970s/early 1980s onwards, often quite close to military bases.
• Second, we know the artistic galactic travelers developed a taste for more and more complex designs over time. The first reported ‘crop circles’ in modern times were rather bland and tended to be ‘circles’ in the normal sense. Later designs are a lot more exotic.
• Third, these ‘extra-terrestrials’ visiting planet earth have a peculiar fondness for the British Isles – especially south-west England. Their taste in scenery quite specific. If one was forced to nominate one English country as most favoured by the cosmic visitors, it would be Wiltshire. Perhaps they appreciate the excellent local beer?
• Fourth, they operate almost entirely in the summer months when the crops are nice and high – and occasionally travel overseas too.

Crop 'Circle' July 1990 Allington Down, near Stanton St.Bernard, Wiltshire; ambitious but not too flashy

Small wonder we weren’t taught this stuff in school 40 years ago. Our teachers weren’t to know this phenomenon was to occur during the lifetimes of their students. They weren’t to know how it would evolve. But teachers in the west country of England these days can’t pretend ignorance. I wonder what on earth they tell the kids now?

Good teachers should not present hypotheses as facts. They should, however, try to present all credible hypotheses. I have a hypothesis to offer which may or may not be on the English curriculum at present. The purpose of this article is to present it. It’s not original… but I do intend to push it rather harder than it’s been pushed before, for reasons I’ll explain.

A little more background first. There are plenty of websites that touch on the topics of ‘crop circles’ – and lots of media references. A few sites are dedicated to the subject and seem carefully prepared and cogent. One or two of them have quite detailed, year by year histories of new occurrences.

Most sites concur that a large number of crop cricles really are obvious hoaxes. In those cases there are tell-tale signs – footprints leading to and away from the circle and indications the crops have been trampled or otherwise manually disturbed to create the pattern. The proportion of crop circles that can be explained in this way is quite large; on one estimate, about 80% of the total.

That still leaves a substantial residue of cases that cannot be explained as amateur pranks. In these instances, there are no signs of trampling and no footprints. Often these happen to be the most complex and artistic designs.

There’s a stunning chronological gallery of Crop Circles on Lucy Pringle’s website. Her gallery goes back as far as 1990. As you can see, more complex designs developed over time – as did the precision of the design work. By the mid-1990s there were some highly elaborate designs. The artistic sophistication of crop circles has been even greater in more recent years.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake

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At this point, I’d like to introduce an audio file which I encountered on the website of Rupert Sheldrake. It’s rather dated – nearly two decades old. Even so, I haven’t found a more recent discussion of equal sophistication.

The discussion about crop circles is one in a series of conversations between three remarkable and unconventional scientists. Dr Sheldrake has posted recordings of these discussions, which took place over a decade ago, on his website. He called them ‘Trialogues‘. They cover a fascinating range of subjects.

The Trialogue discussion on crop circles took place in September 1991.

If you have time, do listen. It’s a real treat!

For those who don’t have time, I’ll do my best to summarize what i regard as the main points in their discussion…

Rupert Sheldrake opened. He knew most about the phenomenon. In part, that was because Sheldrake is both English and based in England, which was the scene of most of the crop circle action at that time (that’s remained the case since).

Additionally, as someone with an interest in the paranormal, who’d already published the controversial (some said heretical) book A New Science of Life, Dr Sheldrake was also well-placed to review this intriguing new phenomenon in the broader context of public interest in UFOs, ancient earth mysteries and the like.

In any event, he gave an excellent account of the phenomenon to that time. It’s remarkable that not much has changed since then… even though new and ever more remarkable crop circles have appeared each year.

Robotic technology improving: Crop circle at Knoll Down near Avebury Trusloe, Wiltshire July 2000 (© Lucy Pringle)

His two colleagues took different positions. Physicist Ralph Abraham asked questions and made some thoughtful comments, but didn’t seem to have a particular theory to propound.

The third scientist, Terence McKenna, was arguably the most unconventional of the three in his professional and personal life. Sadly McKenna died in 2000 at age 53, but in the last years of his life he was a regular at festivals such as Glastonbury, sharing his thoughts and insights with small audiences in muddy tents. During his career, McKenna’s research interests had included ethnopharmacology and shamanism. One might think if one of the three men would come up with a really fanciful ‘New Age’-style explanation for the crop circle phenomenon it would have been McKenna.

In fact, the reverse was true. From early on, Dr McKenna expressed the view that this was almost certainly an exercise in psychological manipulation by British ‘intelligence services’ using advanced (but not ‘otherworldly’) technology to carry out the surreptitious nocturnal design work.

The conversation increasingly turned into McKenna expanding and elaborating on his theory, while Sheldrake and Abraham expressed varying degrees of skepticism about it.

McKenna ended up theorizing that the purpose of the psy-op was to discredit the ‘alternative’ ‘pagan’ movement. Sheldrake thought that rather ridiculous. I agree. In my opinion, McKenna was essentially right about the crop circle phenomenon being a military/’intelligence agency’ psy-op – but wrong about its purpose.

Funky Designs now the norm: Milk Hill, Wiltshire July 2009 (© Lucy Pringle)

McKenna made some predictions about how the phenomenon would end. He theorized it would either fade away (experiment concluded), or that at some point the hoax would be announced to the public. He didn’t consider the possibility that it would run for two more decades without any resolution. I think McKenna didn’t imagine the public would be so silly and disorganized as to put up with that.

But McKenna was wrong. The public has been that silly. The psy-op is ongoing – or was until 2010. Another enchanting and oddly appropriate set of patterns may well appear in the crop-fields of south west Britain in 2011 as summer returns. The game may still be in progress. I think it’s high time to bring it to a close.

McKenna made what to my mind is the killer argument against the phenomenon having an extraterrestrial or paranormal cause.

He pointed out that were that to be the case, the British establishment – military, police, secret services etc – would be on the highest state of alert. After all, powers of unknown origin that can make work-of-art crop circles unseen at night-time near military bases might well be able to re-arrange the bases themselves, scramble nuclear power plants and do heaven knows what to other very mundane phenomena that the British authorities are most keen to keep secure. As there are also numerous American bases in Britain, not only the British state would be alarmed. The whole world would be on edge over crop circles – even if the public as usual was last to know the whole story.

Instead, the entire affair has been laughed off by the establishment. That makes sense only if those ultimately responsible for ‘national security’ know perfectly well who is behind this mysterious phenomenon. They know – because it’s them.

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Since the Trialogue two decades ago, we’ve leaned much more about the so-called national intelligence services, about the extent to which they may well have become infiltrated by hostile third parties and about their likely participation in crimes against humanity.

An elaborate Crop Circle at Woodborough Hill, Wiltshire, August 2009 (© Lucy Pringle)

The image of the jovial, rather inept British intelligence agent painted by Rupert Sheldrake back c 1990 is surely now a relic of past misunderstanding. Consequently, if the British intelligence agencies have been playing games with public consciousness over crop circles, there’s no reason to think its a benign experiment or joke.

My suspicion is that it has been – at least in part – an exercise in the manipulation of public opinion itself. The way the different elements of society conspired unwittingly to perpetuate spooks-seeded mythologies and false ‘New Age’ theories – while failing to home in on the rather obvious explanation for this phenomenon – may well have been tracked with keen interest. If the populace can be confused, befuddled and left in a state of utter uncertainty about a phenomenon such as crop circles, what might be possible with towerblocks?

Questions should certainly be asked in the British Parliament about Crop Circles. The media should not be allowed to let this subject drop until there are real answers. The deception should be publicly exposed – and heads should role in whichever rogue spook organization is responsible.

Playing mind games with the public may not be the worst thing these people do, but it’s an gross abuse of taxpayer funds and falls way outside accepted norms about the appropriate role of civil servants.

Footnote

I noticed since publishing this article that Dr Sheldrake has a paper on his website entitled The Crop Circle Making Competition which I hadn’t spotted before.

Although undated, it appears to have been published much more recently than the Trialogue. Referring to the famous author John Mitchell with whom he jointly organized the 1992 Crop Circle Making Competition, Sheldrake writes:

Almost everyone now agrees that most crop circles are human made. But some enthusiasts still believe that a minority are created by non-human agencies. Surprisingly, there was an article about them in the scientific journal Nature on June 10, 2010, called ‘The Crop Circles Evolves.’ The summary reads: “A growing underground art movement combines mathematics, technology, stalks and whimsy.” But even this scientifically acceptable account has not managed to expel all mystery. The details of the bent stems suggest to the author of the Nature article that “some patterns may have been sculpted using microwave generators, such as masers or magnetrons from microwave ovens.”John enjoyed the continuing evolution of crop circles, their increasing geometrical sophistication, and the way they continue to defy simplistic explanations.

It’s odd to me that even someone as intellectually curious as Rupert Sheldrake can leave the mystery hanging, almost with satisfaction.

Perhaps he’s right to do that? After all, no-one outside the conspirators involved really knows who’s really been responsible for the elaborate Crop Circle phenomenon over the years. Who are they? MI-2012? Is more than one agency involved? Are they in the military? Are corporate interests involved? Who knows?

Unlike Sheldrake, I can’t brush aside the likelihood of state ‘intelligence agency’ / military involvement.

Having paid attention to the shenanigans associated with 9-11 and the 7/7 London Bombings, I’d say the liklihood is high that similar players are involved in this scam as well.

Was the much missed Paul Vijay, RIP, about whose mysterious death I wrote in 2009, coming to a similar view?

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UPDATE 1 (there may be more!)’

Since publishing this article I’ve been followed by two new Twitter users: @CropCircles and CropCircles3d, both associated with websites.

Circles Info is an artistic and interesting site. CropCircles3d helps you turn your favourite design into furniture!

It occurs to me that theories should be testable and falsifiable, so in the spirit of Terence McKenna I’ll take a stab at predicting the end of Crop Circles, at least in their most sophisticated and mysterious manifestation.

I predict that if ever this theory (The Theory of the Spook Origin of Sophisticated Crop Circles) becomes widespread, the phenomenon will draw to a close.

That’s because being caught out AFTER widespread identification of this as the most likely crop circle theory seems unduly risky.

I could well be wrong about that. Who really knows what risks clandestine state-backed operators take?

After all, they appear willing to gamble the future of our entire planetary civilization in pursuit of insane policies of domination and war, derailing global society’s fumbling attempts to develop and implement a re-engineering for sustainability program – which so clearly should be Priority One.

UPDATE 2

Keep up to date with this season’s crop circles worldwide at eCropCircles.com!

Salisbury Plain warning sign: the public is excluded from ~100 square kilometers of what was once delightful English countryside

As you’ll see, there have been some reports from as far afield as Indonesia, but the peaceful rural County of Wiltshire still seems to lead the field for artistic wizardry.

Peaceful, that is, except for the Army Training Estate Salisbury Plain (SPTA), the largest military training area in the United Kingdom.

In November 2009 Britain’s Channel Four screened Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby.

Narrated by Peter Oborne for the Dispatches program, the documentary:

“…investigates one of the most powerful and influential political lobbies in Britain, which is working in support of the interests of the State of Israel.

“Despite wielding great influence among the highest realms of British politics and media, little is known about the individuals and groups which collectively are known as the pro-Israel lobby.

“Political commentator Peter Oborne sets out to establish who they are, how they are funded, how they work and what influence they have, from the key groups to the wealthy individuals who help bankroll the lobbying.

“He investigates how accountable, transparent and open to scrutiny the lobby is, particularly in regard to its funding and financial support of MPs.

“The pro-Israel lobby aims to shape the debate about Britain’s relationship with Israel and future foreign policies relating to it.

“Oborne examines how the lobby operates from within parliament and the tactics it employs behind the scenes when engaging with print and broadcast media.”

This is a superb, must-see documentary. It’s fascinating to read through the 350+ comments on the Dispatches website. A lot of viewers thought the expose was long-overdue. Australians may well ask when – if ever – we’ll see an equivalent made for Australian TV about the influence of Australia’s Israel Lobby.

Towards the end of the program, Oborne discusses the shadowy internet-based Hasbara groups that keep up a loud noise of Zionist partisan protest. They work like irritating little hammers banging on an anvil – the perfect compliment to the mass media’s deeply-embedded, institutional pro-Zionist bias driven from the top.

The existence throughout the western world of this pugnacious, bullying and highly-partisan lobby – a lobby that gives absolute priority to the interests of a foreign power (the State of Israel)  – is an open wound in our contemporary democratic culture.

It distorts domestic politics even in far-away Australasia.

It is living proof of the inherent folly of the Zionist project – a failed colonial scheme whose fabricated sectarian State should, as the Iranian President famously remarked, be “erased from the pages of history”.

Gerry Rafferty was a Scottish songwriter and rock musician who began his musical career as a busker on the London Underground.

Gerry died yesterday, and news of his passing has triggered a remarkable outpouring of grief for a personality not prominent in the media for many years.

His most famous song is probably the melancholy and haunting Baker Street, but ‘Right Down the Line’ is my Gerry Rafferty favourite.

It’s simply one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard…