BY ALLAN GARDINER
At a nearby table, women in soft headscarves arranged an elaborate hookah among the plates of spiced chicken. Children laughed in and out of the buzzing hall. Brisbane's Palestinian community and their supporters had turned up in force to St Andrew's Church Hall in South Brisbane on April 3 to share food, words and music by Phil Monsour to raise funds for APHEDA/Union Aid Abroad programs in Palestine.
Democrats leader Senator Andrew Bartlett was among the supporters but perhaps this was because he played in one of Monsour's many bands, the Cutters, in the late 1980s. As the benefit concert's co-organiser, Hashem Kleibo, pointed out, loud support for Palestinians is not commonly heard from mainstream politicians, even the Greens. This was a night for breaking that kind of silence.
Speeches by Kleibo and by Phil's brother, Joseph Monsour, reminded us that the plight of Palestinians is comparable to that of South African blacks under apartheid. International solidarity of the kind that helped end apartheid is desperately needed.
Joseph and Phil Monsour, as members of a family in touch with its Lebanese origins, inherited this fight as a sort of birthright. For them, bombings in the Middle East could never be ignored as distant events. Even the impressive video show that accompanied Phil's solo performance was handled by teenage members of the Monsour family.
Phil's performance on this night broke a sort of personal silence, too. During the 1980s and '90s he wrote many songs and formed many bands to play them, touring like a trouper nationally and internationally. A job and a family have kept him away from music of late. How he missed it can be guessed from the song "My Guitar is Broken" from his latest CD, Smart Bombs.
Many of these new songs are relevant to the theme of Middle East struggle. The "smart bombs" of the title are not only the ones featured in the myth of "surgical strikes" but the bombs of ideology that keep workers in the West passive and exploited.
"Lover's Ark" expresses an exile's yearning for peace and belonging and even despair over losses and failures. As years go by the struggle for peace, justice and a homeland spans generations.
But Phil sang many of his old songs too, observing ruefully that, while the war continues, the songs remain relevant. "Angels of Death", for example, written in 1985, warns that US-Israeli militarism has been let off the leash. So it has.
This was a concert for those touched by dispossession and resistance. Singing their songs is, for Phil Monsour, a kind of vocation.
[Phil Monsour's music can be ordered on CD from <http://users.tpg.com.au/pmonsour>.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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