Where Dead Voices Gather

I am taken to task for personal attacks last issue on Bono and Peter Sutherland.

“What’s the point of calling a good review of U2 ‘shameless shite’ or describing Peter Sutherland as a ‘bag of blubber’”? I am asked.
OK. I’ll give over about Bono if he gives over about Palestine.
It might be recalled the U2 chanter declared in a NY Times op-ed that: “I’ll place my hopes on the possibility – however remote at the moment – that... people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.”
I haven’t tired of pointing out that the Palestinian Gandhis, Kings and Aung San Suu Kyis have already been found in profusion, and are routinely dismissed, derided, marginalised, intimidated, jailed, tortured, murdered by the Israeli State. If Bono were to say a clear word to support the victims of this savagery, I wouldn’t utter a bad word about him again.
Mohammad Khawaja, 20, died last New Year’s Eve after being shot in the head during a peaceful demonstration in Ni’lin against the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Youssef Ahmed Younes Amirah, 17, was shot dead in July 2008, also in Ni’lin, demonstrating peacefully against the Apartheid Wall.
Mahmoud Muhammad Ahmad Masalmeh, 15, was shot dead trying to cut razor wire from the top of the Wall near Beit Awwa in June 2008.
Muhammad Elias Mahmoud ‘Aweideh, 15, was shot dead during a peaceful demonstration against the West Bank occupation at Um a-Sharayet in March 2007.
Taha Muhammad Subhi al-Quljawi, 16, was shot dead as he and two friends tried to cut the razor wire from the Wall at the Qalandiya Refugee Camp in March last year.
Jamal Jaber Ibrahim ‘Asi, 15, was shot dead in May 2008 during an unarmed demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.
Ahmed Husan Youssef Mousa, 10, was shot dead as he and a group of school-friends tried to drag coils of barbed wire from around olive fields in Ni’lin in August 2008.
I could go on and on and on.
Mohammad Othman was arrested in September last year returning from a conference in Oslo on non-violent strategies for resolving the Palestine issue; school-teacher Abdallah Abu Rahma taken from his home last December, is in indefinite detention, apparently for possession of a peace-sign art-work fashioned from spent teargas cartridges and bullets used against demonstrations. Veteran peacenik protestor Jamal Jumah, seized by Israeli soldiers in December 2009, is being held without charge and in shackles.
Against this background, to urge the Palestinians to generate from within their midst a Gandhi, a King, an Aung San Suu Kyi, is, it seems to me, to put on a display of moral gymnastics for the delectation of Washington, London, Tel Aviv.

Greetings to raven-haired Bogside revolutionary Betty Doherty who by the time you are reading this should be approaching the Raffah crossing into Gaza with the second bus full of medical equipment from our neck of the woods. I passed the house on Little Diamond last night and heard a bunch of her big sons shouting, presumably down the ‘phone-line, “Go on, ma!” But maybe that was on account of them having the house to themselves for a month.

Calling an overweight man “a bag of blubber” might be a bit strong, even if he’s headed Goldman Sachs, BP and Allied Irish Bank and been knighted by British monarch Elizabeth Windsor and is currently Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (I haven’t a clue either) and campaigns for cuts to welfare payments.
I don’t think my comments have done him any harm. I’m told he’s still walking the streets of Dublin without an armed guard.
I suppose it’s not his fault he’s carrying a surfeit of the avoirdupois. I wonder would he turn into a matinee idol if kissed by a princess. I suppose not. More likely the princess would transmogrify into a toad.

The first time I heard Solomon Burke, I thought he was a country singer. He was soaring his voice and stretching the emotion of ‘Out of Reach of My Two Empty Arms’ on 208 metres on the medium waveband. I knew the song then only as a Faron Young number. It’s also been recorded by Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Jim Reeves, Percy Sledge, Tom Jones, George Jones etc. But nobody ever did it better than the big preacherman from Philadelphia.
He never was accorded the status he’s entitled to. Same as can be said of a thousand other flowering talents born to blush unseen, or almost so. Brenda Lee...
Every obit has described Burke as a soul singer, which is fair enough. But country and gospel would be just as apt. The usually-trite phrase can truly be said of him, that he died the way he would have wanted, aged 70, en route to a gig.
Check out his ‘Out of Reach...’ on YouTube. And Brenda Lee’s and Faron Young’s. It’s one of these songs... “A love that runs away from me/ Dreams that just won’t let me be/ Blues that keep on bothering me/ Chains that just won’t set me free/ So far away from you and all your charms/ Just out of reach of my two empty arms.”