Mir Lecture - Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Schedule
Thu, 14 May, 2026 at 07:00 pm
UTC-07:00Location
USCC Brilliant Cultural Centre | Castlegar, BC
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Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the US. He believed in the promises of the West—freedom from authoritarianism, equality for all—but over time, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad tweeted, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” It has been viewed more than 10 million times.
El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the US, as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
—Adapted from Penguin Random House
We thank the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC’s Human Rights and International Solidarity Committee for co-sponsoring this event.
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Where is it happening?
USCC Brilliant Cultural Centre, 1876 Brilliant Rd ,Castlegar, British Columbia, CanadaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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