“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 was a tweet sent out by journalist Omar El Akkad reporting from Gaza last year – a prediction that was viewed 10 million+ times.
Now, El Akkad explains why he tweeted that message in his book ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.’ It is his unblinking polemic on thegeopolitical consequences of the genocide taking place in Israel’s war in Gaza. Akkad bringing into stark relief the decimation of Palestine and its people in retaliation of Hamas’ genocidal attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Reporting on the ground war from Gaza he doesn’t soften the facts of what Palestinians have suffered, however horrific they are to fathom. From the slaughter by massive bombing raids on in ‘safe’ zones to a father kissing the remaining body part exhumed from the rubble.
El Akkad was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail in Canada and has covered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring rebellion in Egypt, the military trials in Guantanamo and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. He is also author of ‘American War’ and ‘What Strange Paradise’ both award winning novels.
He grew up knowing the realities of civil unrest and threats of war. In his new book, He recounts some of his childhood memories of his family’s exile from Egypt,’ emigrating to Qatar, which was drawn into Bush’s ‘Shock and Awe’ attacks in Iraq and Gulf war. He watched his father board up windows as the bombs got closer. His family eventually emigrating to Canada where he dealt with being ‘othered’ over his nationality.
He excoriates Republicans disregard for the lives of Palestinians – men, woman, and children or for that matter, the doctors and aid workers in the fields of battle. El Akkad is even more critical of Democrats calling for a stop to the indiscriminate Israeli bombings and total annihilation at the same time providing weapons in support of Netanyahu’s attacks.
El Akkad points up the Biden administration’s repeated pleas to stop the genocidal indiscriminate missile attacks on Palestinians, and toothless pleas for Netanyahu to stop the carnage. Quite simply, couldn’t justify his rhetoric and paid the political price losing the votes of those against the bombing.
In his chapter on the current state of journalism and reporting the news, he writes. “I find myself returning to Hemingway’s iceberg principle, the notion that the vast majority of what is known about a story should exist beneath the surface of that story unseen … I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and videos of the mutilated, the starved, the dismembered, and I’m reminded that all of this is a functionally invisible to so many people in the part of the world where I now live.”
El Akkad holds news organizations accountable for parsing coverage of the war in Gaza and conflict elsewhere. In the West, particularly following the often euphemistic language to quickly move past the day to day atrocities, or detailed reporting of ongoing crimes against humanity. .
El Akkad reflects on his own role as a war reporter, writing “ I don’t know what this work is anymore. About the need for a nuanced both sides discussion of a genocide.”
He articulates his disillusionment of an ever delineated ongoing divided world order- one of guaranteed privilege to live and prosper and the millions whose lives are completely disregarded and expendable. And is most critical of the trends of corporate print and broadcast news as softening or ignoring world events and to comply to malleable editorializing, or accede to corporate media ‘programming’ the narrative. As cynical as he is about the state of the news media and government control of it, El Akkad’s mission is to report the objective truth.
El Akkad wrestles with his own outrage as tries to examine how anyone, let alone nations, can turn a blind eye to the facts on the ground, writing
“ In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians, as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the Western world. As it stands, the death toll is quite literally uncountable. tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Likely tens or hundreds of thousands more to be found under the rubble, or wasted away from disease and starvation imposed by an occupation force…”
On the last pages of the book, he reminds that are untold heroes fighting for survival of their culture and land, medical staff in Gaza who continue saving lives whilerisking theirs and the humanitarian aid organizations. Hopefully, he will write more about those who go into war zones to save civilians.
Meanwhile, ‘One day..’ is El Akkad’s primal scream against genocide and a blaring reminder that so much is untold in scripted (and unscripted) fogs of war.
==
