One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
Details
Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against.
Winner of the 2025 National Book Award prize for non-fiction.
“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.”
One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is a "breakup letter with the West", serving as a personal reflection on how the West's support of Israel's genocide in Gaza changed El Akkad's views on the West, going from someone that immigrated believing in the project of the Western, liberal "rules-based order", only to slowly find that he no longer believed the West could be trusted to embody the values it claimed to have. In the process, the book also touches on critiques relevant to more than Israel and Gaza. Namely, Akkad also critiques the liberal center, the entreat to support the Democratic Party as the lesser evil, and the hypocrisy of free speech defenders and heterodox intellectuals in their silence during cancellation of authors, students, etc seen as Palestinian supporters.
El Akkad is an Egyptian born journalist who moved to Canada in his teens, later becoming a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan and Middle Eastern politics. His two novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, would later garner a variety of awards.
A Note: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a topic with a politicized and contested history, which has now merged with fault lines in American politics. However, in line with the book's goal of encouraging a moment of reflection that speaks truthfully about the reality of the present, we will limit how much the discussion gets bogged down in conflicting narratives of the centuries of historical background involved in the region.
The War on Empathy - Lindsay Ellis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwpanShgOp4
Al Jazeera Interview with El Akkad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgcoRA9UkN0
AI summary
By Meetup
Reading and discussion of Omar El Akkad's book for readers of geopolitics; outcome: participants summarize how the Gaza crisis reshaped his view of the West.
AI summary
By Meetup
Reading and discussion of Omar El Akkad's book for readers of geopolitics; outcome: participants summarize how the Gaza crisis reshaped his view of the West.