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Omar El Akkad Biography

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“The silence itself becomes an empty canvas, onto which any fantasy can be painted. When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all. Maybe they will have all been terrorists or supporters of terrorists or whatever adjacency to terror is sufficient to scare off those who, in possession of something approximating a soul, might otherwise look upon such obvious assassination and say: This is wrong. Absent an act to describe and the language to describe it, we are capable of believing nothing, or multiple contradictory things, or anything at all.”

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“The most frustrating aspect of all this is that most journalists know how to be tenacious. They know how to chase down a story, how to speak truth to power. In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel or a Black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop or an Indigenous activist beaten at a pipeline protest is a function of preemptive deference to power.”

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“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.”

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“Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.”

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“The Renaissance artists had their many-castled benefactors, why can't we have ours? Because sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It's a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.”

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“Father said he wasn’t worried. He said Americans are like this, brittle with privilege. Sometimes anger robs them of their senses and they make bad decisions, but in a way this was really just another testament to American greatness—how adept the United States was at surviving its endless self-inflicted wounds. We live in a good country, he said, and it will be good again.”

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“Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas, I couldn’t help but think what this company had really innovated was not some brilliant new solution to the traveling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new, lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time have been decent, stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.”

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“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”

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“My fear buys nothing. I expect it to buy nothing. In this case, I want it to buy nothing--who cares how I feel about flags? And yet, I know other people's fear--as irrational than mine, more irrational than mine--buys everything. It moves armies, obliterates thousands. As with rage, there is an invisible force to fear, a gravity. I can no more push my fear upward into another echelon of privilege than those above me can help but let theirs fall, with terrible force, onto the lives of those below.”

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“Immigrants are supposed to be grateful. The narrative arc of immigration, in which one flees their own failing society to come to a better place, a country that was under no obligation to accept them but did, demands perpetual gratitude. And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don't love this country, don't love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

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“I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids." "This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see." 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. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for? The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. 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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“Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.”

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“This work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to not understand, with terrible clarity, that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one’s own neighbors is: Nothing at all.”

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“Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King? I’ve heard said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.”

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“It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.”

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“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power–the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”

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“What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that a sufficient number of children have been murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous? That enough migrants have been caged or drowned to make a particular vacation spot unappealing? That the well-being of Congolese children outranks the desire for ever more powerful smartphones?”

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“In time, there will be nothing particularly controversial about using these words to describe the things they were created to describe. (The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.) Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”

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“Instead, as the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes onto the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing. A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count. Soon Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis. As their eradication continues, they must transform into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened.”

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“Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue--it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.”

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“When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”

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“Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment... Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that's what those people do, they die... For millions of Westerners this will always prove true. But for millions more it will not.”

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“I wanted for that other place. I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom. The freedom to become something better than what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear.”

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“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond. How does one finish the sentence: "It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…" Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night. Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours. What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?”

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“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

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“I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and videos of the mutilated, the starved, the dismembered, and I am reminded that all of this is functionally invisible to so many in the part of the world where I now live. That if it were presented to them, some would undoubtedly respond the way Barbara Bush once did when asked about the Iraqi dead: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” But others, I think, would recoil in a different way. Stubborn as anything, I hang on to the hope that, presented with proof of injustice, the majority human reflex is to act against it.”

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“Among the more troubling trends of twenty-first-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim. Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade's time, will be more moderate and reasonable?”

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“There's immense persuasive power to the notion that the only alternative to mainstream Democratic politics is fascistic Republicanism. Who are Muslim Americans going to turn to? The Arab authoritarians from whom so many of them escaped? China, where Muslims are regularly thrown into concentration camps? Russia, where political opponents are assassinated as a matter of course? It’s a kind of thinking predicated on the implicit belief that, for certain people, the only choice is between negations of varying severity. The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”

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“Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is--and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them--it subscribes to this calculus.”

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“The man on TV said Americans are good people you know but they only vote one of two ways with their hearts or with their heads and let’s hope it’s not too late let’s hope it’s not too late but thank the Lord this time they came to their senses and voted with their heads. But it didn’t seem to me like they voted with their heads. It seemed like they voted with their fangs.”

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“Father sat in his easy chair, occasionally shaking his head and saying how this was just the way the cycle worked—one time they vote for what they believe themselves to be and the next they get angry and vote for what they really are.”

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“....that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren't a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government's disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas.”

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“In a perfect world, politics is boring, informed by debate but assured of a mutual understanding that the civic good matters. It’s tree-cutting permits and public transport levies and people who go to school for years and years to learn how to best pass a thoroughfare through a residential area. Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?”

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“One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually.”

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