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Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

“One of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence. The argument that violence in any form debases us and marks the instant failure of all involved is much more difficult to make when the state regularly engages in or approves of wholesale violence against civilians and combatants alike. Instead, the case for nonviolence becomes, in the ugliest way, pragmatic: the state wants violence, because in that playing field it maintains every advantage, from bigger guns to total immunity to the privilege of perpetual victimhood.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“The main event sees a CNN moderator lob questions at nine Republican hopefuls, all of whom take turns doing the sort of thing Republicans have been doing for most of the twenty-first century, painting the United States as simultaneously the greatest country on Earth and a nightmare place. An enormously powerful, God-chosen nation in which families are too scared to leave their homes at night.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“I have spent the entirety of my life stitching together costumes to make Westerners feel at ease in my presence--a massive internal compendium of cultural references and jokes and shorthand and all these alternate means of saying, Don't worry, I'm not foreign, I'm like you--and suddenly I've run out of things to wear.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“Montreal is not a forgiving initiation....My parents and I had only just arrived in Canada three months earlier. On my last morning in Qatar, the temperature was set to reach a high somewhere in the 40s Celsius, the 110s Fahrenheit. Now, magnified by this thing called wind chill that I'd never heard of before, Montreal dips to 30 or 40 below zero, where the distinction between Celsius and Fahrenheit doesn't much matter anymore.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“It came to me, a long time later, that the Southeast Asian man had done something worse than dent a fancy car's bumper. He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence. In this place, at this time, people who looked like him were to be invisible. They could perform labor and be paid wages, but as vessels of agency, beyond the most necessary transactions, they quite simply did not exist. They were not subhuman, they were nonhuman, non-anything. To allow oneself to think otherwise risked having to contend with the reality that this whole place lived on top of people who looked just like this man.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, if the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.”

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“It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don't actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems will do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way, be understood – only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque — what we do to one another so grotesque — that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“Look up photographs of what we now consider this country's -- any country's -- most morally diseased moments. [...] Ignore, for a moment, the people engaged most directly in the violence. Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you'll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you'll see a childish little smirk. It's the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now.”

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“In late February 2024 I talk to a friend of mine, a Palestinian Canadian author whose debut novel, rejected by many publishers, seems to have finally found a home. He says he still doubts whether it'll actually go out into the world. But he takes some solace in the likelihood that, by next year or the year after, it won't just be Gaza that's on fire, but the whole world, so what difference does it make what one book does? We laugh, but I can't mount much of a counterargument. I know when an Arab says things like this, there's a natural impulse to believe he's talking about some great violent retribution, but I know what my friend means. A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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