As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That 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. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming ... Passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read.
It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right. The genocide is happening before our eyes. We can speak out, or we can choose apathy and collusion. And condemn our souls.
