Summary and Reviews of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

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

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad
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  • Feb 25, 2025, 208 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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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Reviews

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El Akkad places a large part of the blame not only on politicians, but also on the press, a world he knows well. His book is a hybrid memoir of sorts, and it incorporates his personal story of being born in Egypt, growing up in Qatar, and moving as a teenager to Canada, where he began writing for his college newspaper shortly after 9/11, later covering a variety of international stories for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He despairs at what his profession has become, the "tortured, spineless" way in which newspaper headlines characterize acts of war (an example from The Guardian: "Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect's Home"). The journalist's job, El Akkad argues, is "to agitate against silence," but too often these days, Western journalists, paralyzed by the need for "self-erasing neutrality," resort to "a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on the poll numbers. Everything becomes a horse race."..continued

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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).

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Beyond the Book



"In This House, We Believe"

Photograph of the original design for the yard sign with slogans displayed in various colors and fonts In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad levels several critiques against Western liberalism and its contradictions. One of the most damning is this: "It's difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be...Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are supposed to oblige." One of the most visible sets of slogans about progressive beliefs, nearly ubiquitous in some residential neighborhoods in so-called blue states, has become the subject of both inspiration and ridicule: the "In this house, we ...

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