Mir Lecture - Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the US. He believed in the promises of the West—freedom from authoritarianism, equality for all—but over time, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and more. Watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad tweeted, “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.” It has been viewed more than 10 million times.

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 US, as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

—Adapted from Penguin Random House

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