Rising joblessness in Europe: thanks for nothing, Brussels.

This piece of mine appears in The Week/The First Post.

Neil Clark: Collapse of SeaFrance and the ban on Iranian oil prove EU bigwigs are dangerously out of touch




YOU MIGHT think that with 23m people out of work in Europe, the EU and its organisations would be doing everything they could to preserve European jobs and help Europe's beleaguered economies. Think again.



This week there have been three examples of how the EU is working against economic recovery.

You can read the whole of the article here.

Don't Attack Iran: Please sign the Stop the War petition

We are extremely concerned at reports that plans are being drawn up for an attack on Iran. The case being made for war on Iran is based on a series of speculations about 'undisclosed nuclear-related activities' reminiscent of the disproven 'intelligence' about weapons of mass destruction used to justify the disastrous attack on Iraq.



The West's attitude to Iran's nuclear weapons is hypocritical and contradictory. The US and its allies remain silent about Israel's covert nuclear arsenal, the only one in the Middle East, while they are tightening the campaign of sanctions against Iran without real evidence......

You can read the whole of the Stop the War petition (which also calls for the lifting of sanctions against Iran), here. Please spend a moment or so to sign the petition, and tell your friends about it too. We can't allow the serial warmongers to initiate yet another war of aggression against an independent sovereign state.
UPDATE: Great piece by Seumas Milne in today’s Guardian: The war on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us.

The west has Iran in its sights

Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya.... and now Iran.

William Hague has denounced the action of the students as a violation of international law. But Iran itself has been targeted for many years by a series of western and UK policies that are gross violations of international law. Repeatedly threatening Iran with a military attack, thinly disguised under the phrase "all options are on the table" and publicly announcing that the west must use covert operations to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme (as John Sawers, the head of MI6, demanded two years ago), are only two examples of the UK's disrespect for the UN charter. It is no wonder that many Iranians believe the UK must have been involved in the assassination of two prominent Iranian nuclear physicists in the past two years.



You can read the whole of Abbas Edalat’s great article on the west’s increasingly aggressive stance towards Iran, and what it is building up to, here.

Abbas is the founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.
Do try and lend your support to their campaign.

Craig Murray on Fox, Werrity and Gould and the questions which must be answered

Top class investigative blogging from Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan.

Take a look at this.  Then this.  And then this.

It’s good that, after all Craig's digging, the MSM are now asking questions about the Fox/Werrity/Gould meetings.

The neocon elite doesn’t want ordinary people to find out what they’re up to behind the scenes- so bravo to Craig for his persistence.

HAT TIP: John Edwards.
 

If you lived in Iran, wouldn't you want a nuclear bomb?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.



The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.


If that wasn't worrying enough, your country seems to be under (covert) attack…


Wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?


You can read the whole of Mehdi Hasan’s brilliant Guardian article on the threat posed to Iran, here.