Omar El Akkad, the Canadian-American journalist and award-winning author of “What Strange Paradise” and “American War,” makes his non-fiction debut with “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” titled after his viral tweet from October of 2023 referencing the Palestinian genocide.
Born in Cairo, Egypt, but raised in Doha, Qatar, El Akkad came to Canada at 16 years old. The author was a staff reporter at The Globe and Mail for ten years, where he covered the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring in Egypt. In America, he covered the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri.
In “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” El Akkad has penned his “heartsick breakup letter with the West.” The journalist used to believe in the West’s promise of freedom and justice for all, but has come to the conclusion that most of those promises are lies, “[t]hat 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.”
Spring’s Sarah Jessica spoke to El Akkad about his most vulnerable work to date, his views on the role of a journalist working within the empire, and how we as everyday working class individuals can fight against the theft of our morality.
The role of a journalist
Sarah Jessica: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is a commonly heard line that you reference in your book when attempting to define the role of a journalist in the West. This value obviously contradicts itself when western journalists are also expected to maintain “neutrality” and “objectivity.” In an ideal world, what role would journalism play in a time like this?
Omar: Trying to find the middle ground between two opposing opinions only really has a chance of working if both those opinions are coming from a place that is not disingenuous, which, when you take a look at our political landscape, has no relationship to reality. Certainly in the country I live in, one of the two major political parties is now, as a matter of course, predicated on disingenuousness. So we find ourselves in this absurd situation where I go interview a Republican lawmaker, who tells me she believes that wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers. Now what am I going to do, go find an expert on space lasers to tell me that’s not true? And then present those two opinions as if they’re valid? It’s ludicrous.
So I think, in the environment that we live in, journalism has to do a much better job at two things: the first is closing the gap between the story as it would be written without external pressure, pressure from advertisers, pressure from angry comments, so on so forth, and the story as it would be written absent those pressures. The distance between those two things is my definition of journalistic malpractice.
The second is that journalism has to get much better at calling out bullshit for what it is—we are not very good at that, and I say that as a former full-time journalist and a practicing part-time journalist. We don’t know what to do when somebody lies to our face. We can put certain claims in quotation marks, we can find an expert to refute something, but there’s still a baseline level of legitimacy that most of us give in good faith, that nonetheless falls apart when somebody is lying to our face. I think until journalism learns to be much much better at dealing with those two issues, we are going to be a bigger part of the problem than we are the solution.
SJ: How has this genocide shifted your identity as a writer and a journalist?
Omar: I think first and foremost, it’s done two things to me that I don’t think can be undone. The first is that it has caused me to care a lot less about things that previously would’ve been a central part of my ambition and my identity. I say without hyperbole that, a couple of years ago, things like selling the book, and having the book be a commercial success, and getting the next book deal, and getting nominated for awards, would’ve been of vital importance to me. I’m not proud of that, but it also would be a lie if I tried to sit here and tell you otherwise. Almost all of these things don’t matter to me in the slightest anymore. I still have to live under capitalism and I still have to survive under these prevailing systems of power, but as far as it was related to my identity, it isn’t anymore. I genuinely don’t care if this is the last book I ever write—or the last book I ever publish, because I’m going to keep writing regardless.
So a lot of things that used to matter to me don’t matter to me anymore. The other thing it’s done to me is caused me to no longer be able to maintain a baseline level of obliviousness with regards to my own complicity and my own involvement, in what is, in my opinion, the worst atrocity of my lifetime.
I’ve said it several times, and again I say it without hyperbole—I’m killing those kids. My tax money is doing that. I am responsible for it. The same forces that make it possible for me to know with real certainty that if I go to my light switch right now and flick it on, the lights are gonna come on, and if I turn on the taps, water’s gonna come out, and if I log on to talk to you, my internet’s not gonna give way, are also the forces that are tearing kids limb from limb on the other side of the planet.
A previous version of me I think could’ve mustered the power of dissociation necessary to not confront this reality, and I think that ship has sailed. Primarily those are the two things that the last year and a half have done to me, and while both are personally cataclysmic, both are also relatively meaningless compared to the scale of carnage that I’ve witnessed over the last year and a half, so I think it’s important to keep that in perspective.
SJ: You say you don’t have an answer anymore to the question of the role of a writer. What did your original definition include, at the beginning of your career, and what do you see it becoming in the future, maybe post-genocide?
Omar: I think my overarching definition of what it means to be a writer is relatively unchanged, in the sense that I think every time we engage in the act, regardless of which avenue of attack we choose, we are essentially trying to say something about what it means to be human, and that is relatively unchanged.
I think the narrative cover that I afford myself as a writer has imploded, and what I mean by that is, again, there used to be a part of me that could retreat into writing as a sort of conduit of beauty. In a sense, adhere to that notion that something about literature hovers above all of this pettiness, and won’t let itself be sullied by the base concerns of the political, or the activist, or all that stuff that lives down there in the gutter. To be honest, I now think a lot of that is bullshit. I think a lot of that is self-preservation.
I go back to this notion of narrative cover, because what it affords me as a writer is the ability to maintain a sense of self-importance while refusing to engage with, again, the defining moral and literal atrocity of our time. People can write about whatever the hell they want, I don’t care, and god knows some of my favourite writing can be described as not actively political, and might be concerned with the beauty of the moon or whatever.
I have no issue with that—it’s some of my favourite writing. My issue is with this notion of selective after-the-fact activism in the literary world. Once an issue is settled and the dead are buried, it becomes much much easier to suddenly develop this moral, intellectual, and literary backbone. Address it directly when it’s too late to do anything of value to stop it. That’s where I have an issue. Beyond that, I genuinely don’t care what anybody chooses to write or not write about.
It’s not the subject matter that gets to me, it’s the certainty of knowing that many years from now, the same writers who say nothing in the moment will have lots to say after the fact.
SJ: A line that speaks to this that stuck out to me in your book was, “there will be plenty of time to write about the shape and the shade of the bones.”
Omar: I think if history is any guide, this is gonna be a really rewarding thing. Like, from a purely Machiavellian amoral standpoint, the smartest thing that a lot of writers can do right now is shut the hell up. Just wait, that will be available to you. I know that’s cynical, but I can’t get it out of my head.
SJ: You touch on almost attending a literary prize ceremony in Toronto in early November 2023, where a protest for Gaza took place. You mentioned that the part of that evening that fascinated you the most was all the people in the room that kept their heads down and said nothing, “a room full of storytellers, suddenly finding common cause in silence.” Do you believe that this betrayal of journalistic principles will have a lasting effect on the industry, but also on the definition of journalism itself?
Omar: That’s a difficult question to answer because my immediate response is, “Yes, of course.” That’s not necessarily a good thing. What I mean by that is, I strongly suspect, because we live in a part of the world that is so relatively untouched by the reality of the carnage, that one of the lasting effects is going to be that a lot of writers within this community stop talking to one another, and that a lot of these friendships end over people’s positions with regard to the genocide. Which again, feels like the pettiest possible consequence, but I can’t ignore the reality that that’s probably going to be, in terms of day-to-day life within this thing we call CanLit, maybe the most visible. God, that feels so stupid to say, but I think it’s true.
Right now I’m reading this manuscript, this is Saeed Teebi’s new book, “You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times,” and it’s a magnificent piece of work. Part of the reason it’s magnificent is because Saeed is a magnificent writer, but part of the reason it’s magnificent is because this isn’t far away for him. He’s not writing from a great distance. A lot of us are. Even I, who feels a deep personal connection to the subject matter, am not nearly as close, and I’m closer than a lot of these other writers. So that distance can’t be ignored.
In terms of the actual protest and what happens that night, I think two things come to mind. The first is, and I say this in the book, I can’t discount the possibility that I would have been one of those people who kept his head down. That I would have been swayed, by both my cowardice and my desire to be liked, and I would’ve said nothing. I don’t get to find that out now, because I didn’t go.
The other is that it has already caused a change, we already have the biggest, most important literary prize in Canada cutting ties with the bank that invests in companies helping to facilitate this slaughter. That’s not because of the writers in the room, or anything I or anyone else has written; that’s because of the work these activists did at great personal cost, including the potential loss of their freedom at the hands of the state. So yes, I think there have been consequences, and will continue to be, it’s just that some of them are not particularly important or relevant consequences, and the ones that are, are not because of the writers in that room. They are because of the people who put their freedom and bodies on the line to make this happen.
SJ: When pro-Palestinian journalists and writers are censored and purged from newsrooms, do you think that this mass repression of dissenting speech forges a new way forwards for writers?
Omar: I think so, because these sort of tactics always work until they don’t. This is glaringly obvious in the case of Palestine, but it’s not exclusive to Palestine or Palestinians. It has always been the case that repression of dissenting voices works, until it doesn’t.
I don’t think I’ve written a particularly important or long-lasting book, but I think the spaces that this book has opened up, and I mean this in terms of actual physical spaces like going to do the book events, has given me a real insight into the level of frustration that people feel with exactly the kind of repression that you’re describing. I can’t tell you the number of times following a book event when a journalist, in some cases a former colleague, has come up to me to say, “I don’t know what to do.” They’re reporters with some of the biggest newspapers in the world who have come to these events and have asked me whether they should quit, or whether they should continue and stay agitating from the inside, and I genuinely don’t know what to tell them.
I also know that I have, at least in my very limited experience, never seen this level of frustration, this level of anger with the systems, inside of which these reporters are working. I think that means something. Unfortunately there’s a glacial quality to a lot of this kind of stuff, and so when I’m thinking about how this impacts the ecosystem of journalism, I’m thinking two-to-five, ten years down the road. Administrators and management and the ownership class tend to move very very slowly in response to pressure from below. At the very least I know that pressure exists, because I’ve seen it every day for months now.
SJ: Do you have any motivational advice for anti-imperialist journalists working within the empire?
Omar: I go back to what I’m seeing at these events, and when I talk to journalists. This level of frustration. The reason I go back to that is because, I think if you are a reporter and you’re struggling with these issues, and struggling with your place within these machines, yes it’s infuriating. Yes, it can induce an immense sense of dejection. Fundamentally, it is a good thing, because it’s indicative of the presence of a soul.
I know journalists who don’t care in the slightest about any of these issues, neither in concrete terms or even in the abstract, as a kind of thought experiment, and I genuinely worry for them. Your ability to refuse to contend with this, means that there is not much you won’t refuse to contend with. If so, you will have an incredibly rewarding career, you will be rewarded endlessly for that particular kind of moral flexibility, but it’s indicative of a glaring absence of something that I think is vital for every journalist to possess.
So the closest thing I can come to a sort of hopeful piece of advice for someone in this kind of situation, is to understand that the position that they are in to begin with is indicative of a moral compass, and to do everything in one’s power not to let that compass atrophy. On a day-to-day basis, this must be the most frustrating thing in the world, to be involved in an endeavor that possesses a self-conception related to the telling of truth, and the affecting of positive change through simply telling the truth, and then to see the reality of it as such a betrayal in the moment where it’s most needed—that’s not a pleasant thing. More power to anyone who can withstand that kind of enforced dissociation.
“Fight against the theft of your soul”
SJ: Complacent working class people feel comfortable dismissing the war crimes of the empire, when in reality, they are civilians themselves, and it’s only a matter of time before they become the consumed themselves. You touch on this hypocrisy in the book, where you say that although this critique is true, working class people within the empire are already having something terrible done to them—that they are being stripped of their soul. They are being, in your words, “asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.” What do you think the consequences of this are, for these working class people individually, but also for us as a collective society?
Omar: I’m always cautious about the idea of splitting the world into neat binaries, because I don’t think that’s how the world works most of the time—but I do believe generally speaking, almost everyone, not just the working class, is either engaged with the idea that our liberation is intertwined, or they believe in silos of experience.
If you believe in silos of experience, which is to say that my liberation is completely severed from the liberation of someone who is not like me, then you will always be susceptible to the argument that is made by systems of power at all times, but especially during moments of grotesque atrocity, which is that atrocity is isolated and will never come to your doorstep. That it exists in one of these silos, and will never leave that side. We know, historically speaking, that A, is not true, but B, that even if it were, the damage it is doing to you is still very real and very present.
We live under systems of power that impose on everyone but the wealthiest, most empowered sliver a kind of weight that is ever expanding. I find myself in this very difficult position of trying to make the case that we should take our very deliberately limited efforts under such a system, and pull them away from simply trying to survive, and simply trying to pay the mortgage and buy the groceries, and dedicate some of them to the liberation of a human being, or a group of human beings, who can offer us nothing material in return. That’s a very tough sell, but so long as we sort of ignore it out of hand as being impractical or unrealistic, we dig ourselves further and further into the hole we’re in.
Not only are we watching that same oppression and same injustice and same ruin come closer and closer to our door, but as that happens we are deliberately ruining our ability to be outraged by it. That’s a very, very dangerous thing, but it’s not an easy thing to fix because we live in a system that every single day deliberately hampers our ability to think outside of pragmatic self-interest. It’s one of the most destructive things this way of living does.
SJ: How can we push back against the stripping of our empathy? Whether that occurs through complacency, escapism, or genuine burn-out?
Omar: Off the top of my head, I’m going to four places. The first and most obvious is simple acknowledgement. I think one of the privileges of living on the launching side of the missiles is that there’s a vast spectrum of brutality that quite simply can be ignored. If I were to turn off whatever part of my psyche forces me to look at the carnage my taxpayer money is funding, it would in reality not change a single part of my day-to-day existence in terms of my interactions, in terms of my professional aspirations, in terms of most of my social interactions where people simple don’t talk about any of this. So to not do that, and to simply acknowledge the reality of the situation, is, as depressing as it sounds, a fairly revolutionary act. Not in of itself, but relative to how unrevolutionary most of our daily existence is in this part of the planet.
The second thing that comes to mind is rejection. There have been so many times, even in the last year and a half, where I found myself changing fundamentally as a human being, where my cowardice still won out, in the sense that I’ll be at a dinner party, or I’ll be at my kid’s school volunteering, and someone will say something that is a textbook example of genocide denial, or atrocity denial, or the vast dehumanization of an entire group of human beings. I will know this to be true, and yet a part of me will say, “Hey, don’t make trouble.” So, the simple act of rejection, of saying, “Hold on a second, I disagree with that,” is again, in and of itself not particularly revolutionary, but in the context of the kind of world we live in, relatively quite revolutionary. Which is a very sad thing to say.
We talk about this all the time in other contexts. When you go back to the house for Thanksgiving dinner, what are you going to say when your transphobic uncle makes that comment? Are you going to reject it, or are you going to say nothing because you just want this dinner to go over quietly?
So rejection comes to mind, and then refusal comes to mind, which I think of as distinct from rejection. What are you refusing to participate in? What events are you not going to go to? What companies are you no longer going to give your money to? What are you willing to give up? There is no correct answer to that question, but everybody needs to make that determination. The playing field of refusal is one of the least asymmetric in favour of the state. I write about this in the book—the state has a much hazier idea of what to do with somebody who refuses to participate, whereas everytime I go to a protest, the cops can beat the shit out of me.
Finally, and I think this is related to the idea of rejection but probably more broad, everyone needs to come to terms with how troublesome they’re willing to be. Not just in terms of what arguments you are going to reject, but what personal consequences are you willing to face? For some people, myself included, that answer might force you into a very uncomfortable reckoning with your own bravery, or lack thereof. Nonetheless, that conversation needs to be had. How troublesome are you willing to be? At the very least, if your self-conception assumes a certain level of troublesomeness, but your reality is entirely different, that gap between those two things is going to be psychologically harmful to you. You need to be honest with yourself. Just how much is facing down an injustice worth to you personally?
SJ: In your book you say that there are certain groups of people who understand that, “empathy can always be faked in hindsight so long as the bad thing is being done to someone else.” What does it mean when these liberals who engage in this practice of whitewashing their fascistic beliefs are the supposed moral representatives of the west? What is the result?
Omar: I think more than anything it means that a certain kind of cold, amoral pragmatism wins. It becomes the default way of thinking of the world. By comparison, any other mode of thinking about the world that centres our moral obligation to take care of one another, is made to seem deeply childish—because after all, the world is a great geopolitical chess match, and anyone who thinks otherwise is behaving in a juvenile way. To me, that’s the most destructive consequence of this kind of centrist, liberal approach to thinking about what we owe one another.
Ultimately it does provide an answer to that question, and the answer is nothing. We owe each other nothing, and anyone who says otherwise is leading us down the road to bread lines and rations. There’s such an imaginative poverty that is almost necessary as a component to that kind of worldview, because at any given moment, no matter how many people are working themselves to death in the sweatshops so that I can have cheap sneakers, or how many people are being slaughtered within the confines of their open-air prisons so that my police force can have more lethal drones, this is still considered the best way of doing things, at all times. That, to me, is such an abdication, not only of moral responsibility, but of imaginative responsibility. The idea that we can never do better than whatever it is we’re doing right now, is hardly ever spoken in those terms by someone who supports the systems under which we live, but it is always implied.
There’s something almost, in the most grotesque way, comforting about seeing a straightforward fascist say such a thing in no uncertain terms, than hearing it couched in liberal platitudes by somebody whose performance of self is dependent on believing in progress, but whose reality of self seems to stand in the way of progress at every turn. It’s maddening.
SJ: Young working class people are breaking up with the west en masse. Watching the protests, encampments, and BDS-led initiatives being led by a wave of young progressives, what do you think this says about the future of the western empire?
Omar: In my opinion, it’s two things. The first is that despite the implicit assumption within so many of our systems of power that morality can simply be set aside for whatever personal benefit, that that simply is not true. That the young folks across the country, across the continent, across the world, are proving that it’s not true every single day.
That is what these folks are doing in a very real sense, they are setting aside personal benefit to maintain a functioning morality. Amidst a world that urges them and compels them at every turn to do the exact opposite. That lets me know that the veneer of inevitability that hovers around everything from state violence, to the tech industry’s embrace of artificial intelligence, to every mode of institutional power, is simply that: a veneer that can be cracked and can be shattered by people with willpower and a functioning moral compass.
The second thing it tells me, which is not quite as admirable but I think equally true, is that the prevailing reward-punishment equilibrium that has defined the post-war era, and certainly the entirety of my lifetime, is very much breaking apart. There used to be a time, at least up until my generation, where both the punishment for falling out of line and the reward for falling in line were clearly known. You could always have your life ruined by the state and by systems of power if you fell out of line, but the flipside of that coin was that if you did as you were told, there was a reward there. In the form of the house in the suburbs, and the two car garage, and the life that in every material respect was better than your parents’ generation. Now that side of the equilibrium has fallen apart.
I obviously don’t know what it’s like to be a young person right now, but from my experience talking to young folks, this idea that there is a standard, set reward on the other side of compliance has completely disappeared. Not only is the house in the suburbs not waiting for you, not only is the idea of home ownership in the first place not waiting for you, but it may well be the case that the notion of a livable planet may not be waiting for you. If the punishment-reward equilibrium itself has fallen apart, why the hell should I be doing the same amount of damage to my soul, for a vastly reduced exchange rate? Even if we are to take morality out of it entirely and think of it on purely machiavellian pragmatic grounds, the sales pitch has collapsed.
So those are the two things that it tells me. Of course that’s easy for me to say, being twice as old as these kids, and living in a house in the suburbs, and having snuck in to certain elements of reward that for much of this younger generation, have quite simply evaporated.
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