The Break with the West: Omar El Akkad and Yohan Shanmugaratnam

«The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single questions, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?» One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

The lack of a response from the West to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza reveals how the West values certain lives more than others, according to author and journalist Omar El Akkad. For El Akkad, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar, the West long represented the polar opposite to everything he hated about the Middle East: The corruption, the censorship, the surveillance, the exaltation of corrupt leaders.

As a teenager, El Akkad moved with his family to North America, and became a part of the liberal Western world order. Despite a few reservations, he kept his faith in the West as a region committed to human rights, freedom, justice and respect for the law. Until October 8th, 2023, when Israel launched their latest war against Gaza.

The essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a reckoning with what El Akkad considers to be the West’s double standards. He exposes rhetoric and euphemisms that allow murder on innocent civilians, that necessitates the new acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and shows how the Gaza war is part of a longer history of us versus them.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and journalist of many years. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is his first non-fiction book, it has garnered broad attention and is under translation into a number of languages.

At the House of Literature, El Akkad was joined by author and journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam for a conversation about anger, the suffering in Gaza and Western double standards.

The event was supported by NORAD.

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