Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad is a multi-award-winning author - most recently, the winner of the National Book Award in the USA - and an investigative journalist, who came to Canada from Egypt as a child and later moved to the U.S. 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 put out a tweet: “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.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage. (Adapted from the website of Penguin Random House.)

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Host or Publisher Mir Centre for Peace at Selkirk College