Author: Omar El Akkad
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult nonfiction
Pages: 208 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (OR), Egypt, Qatar, Canada, Afghanistan, Palestine
Summary: On October 25, 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 has been viewed more than 10 million times.
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.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
Review: I only saw this book reviewed on a couple of book blogs near the end of 2025, and then saw it on a NY Times list as well, so I got myself a copy and planned to read it soon. Wow, I see why it won the National Book Award for 2025. This is a thoughtful account of El Akkad's life, his experiences as a journalist and as a Muslim man in the 21st century. He looks at various events, with an emphasis on the current war on Palestine, and walks the reader through the idea that we in the "west" change our opinions as events unfold and take on an attitude of "I always felt this way."
For example, colonialism. Western nations were the perpetrators of horrible events, coups, and outright takeovers of Global South countries (and no, the current US actions in Venezuela are not lost on me as I read this book and the news). It is what has given us our power and standing. And yet, when those same nations rose up against their oppressive governments in the 1960s, we applauded their revolutions against the settlers, completely ignoring that we were the settlers.
One of the most important aspects of this book is that it lets no one off the hook. El Akkad points out that Democrats are some of the worst about the things he talks about. Those on the left claim to be so much better than those on the right, but similar actions take place under all administrations; the left just talks publicly about how they care about people while committing the crimes (deportations, denying health care, etc). This is a book that is important for people on both sides to read and to really consider our own actions and thoughts.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet (Author)--E
- Alphabet (Title)--O
- Cover Lover--punctuation in the title (comma)
- Immigration--the author's family moved from Egypt to Qatar to Canada to the USA.
- Literary Escapes--Canada, Egypt, Qatar, Afghanistan, Palestine
- Mount TBR
- Nonfiction--History
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