Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Omar El Akkad
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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As Omar El Akkad watched an ever greater number of social media clips from the war in Gaza, he started to question not just his place in the global world order, but also the system itself. “I was sitting with these ideas of what the hell my place was in the West, because I didn’t know anymore,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “A lot of the load-bearing beams, institutionally and narratively, that I believed in for a lot of my life were coming apart in front of my eyes.”
El Akkad put many of those ideas to paper in his acclaimed new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” He joins Al Yafai on the podcast for a searingly honest and frank conversation about his own personal responsibility in the conflict and whether the war could undermine the foundations of the liberal world order.
“A lot of the load-bearing beams, institutionally and narratively, that I believed in for a lot of my life were coming apart in front of my eyes.”
Of his positionality between that world order and the ongoing conflict, El Akkad says, “The defining aftertaste of the book is a deep personal uncertainty, because there’s nothing in this book that is indicted or interrogated or autopsied in which I am not deeply complicit. … It’s not so much that there exists this incredibly racist hierarchy — I think I knew that, consciously or subconsciously for a long time. It’s that I can no longer tether myself to a particular ideological orientation that allows me to be oblivious to this.”
El Akkad’s background as a writer highlighted what he sees as one of the central hypocrisies of the liberal worldview. “I sit and think about language. That is essentially the entirety of my professional life,” El Akkad says. “One of the difficulties I’ve had in the last year and a half is watching how easily language can be used for the exact opposite of what language is supposed to be used for, which is the making of meaning.”
According to El Akkad, the liberal order may not survive its weaknesses that have been exposed by the Gaza war. “My sense is that we’re watching the last days of a particularly ineffectual kind of centrism that can no longer function as even a performative kind of resistance to the outright fascism that is slowly taking over so many of the most powerful nations and institutions on Earth,” he says.