"From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 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 was viewed more than ten milliontimes. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn’t consider you fully human.

On October 25th, 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 was viewed more than ten million times.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.
This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the West, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France, and Germany.? It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we're undergoing a shift in the so-called “rules-based order,” a generation that understands the West can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar's own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the Western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.
This book is El Akkad's heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a breakup we are watching all over the United States, on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time. - (Random House, Inc.)

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* "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 Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

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