The complete tweet, from October 2023, provides the basis for Omar El-Akkad’s astonishing new book. It’s also foil-stamped on the hardcover under the dust jacket:
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book that I’m struggling to write about. I’ve followed Omar El Akkad’s writing from when he was a young reporter at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, through his outstanding fiction (the essential American War, and the slim but stunning What Strange Paradise). Those books were kind of testing grounds for El Akkad’s thinking about exceptionalism in the West, and this book is the searing and unforgettable endpoint.
El Akkad’s collection of essays is written from a place of exhausted disillusionment with the hypocrisy of western governments, liberalism and the media’s complicit coverage of the genocide in Gaza. He weaves in intimate personal history, his professional experience as an international reporter, and his complete horror at a system that refuses to acknowledge what is happening.
Chapters open with prose that hits like a bolt of lightning:
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.
And he doesn’t let up for a second. In the tradition of books like The Fire Next Time and Between the World and Me, the fear and fury are woven into every word – such that a sub-200 page book took me four days to read. Almost every page has a turn of phrase or juxtaposition that lays bare the hypocrisy of the western liberal. Like this:
How does one finish the sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but..”
Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser— You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.
It’s overwhelmingly grim and heavy, but essential. El Akkad doesn’t give in to hyperbole or exaggeration: everything in here is clear-eyed and well-reasoned.
Stunning stuff that I’ll certainly read again.
Further reading
Interviews in: Toronto Life | LitHub | Electric Lit | The Guardian
NYT Review (gift link)
