One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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.

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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.

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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.

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