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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values
"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto."—The New York Times
“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

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.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. 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.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
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    • Library Journal

      September 1, 2024

      El Akkad (American War; What Strange Paradise), a novelist, journalist, and winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, writes about the failure of the West to live up to the values it has enshrined and the consequences of witnessing that failure, over and over again. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2025
      An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war. "Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power." So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad's pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, "I want nothing to do with this." El Akkad, author of the novelAmerican War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West's defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself--El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq--he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the "entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self--decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion." Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we've seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to "a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul." A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from January 1, 2025
      "This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all." So begins novelist and journalist El Akkad's fierce, anguished indictment of Western hypocritical indifference towards Israel's destruction of Gaza. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the shadow of 9/11 and the War on Terror, El Akkad (born in Egypt and raised in Qatar, he landed in Canada as a teen) wryly comments on the popular identification of his culture and religion with terrorism and positions the October 7 Hamas attacks within the history of colonialism. He firmly rejects a Jewish versus Muslim framing, marveling that "many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews." However, the representatives of moral liberalism--prelates, politicians, and professors--El Akkad writes, deliberately look away as innocents die because, "the empire . . . must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism." Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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