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Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

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

PoliticsJusticePowerActivismResistancePolitical SystemsDemandingFighting The Power
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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