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Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

“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.”

FearPowerPrivilegeDamageIrrationalityPower DynamicsCollateral Damage
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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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.”

NationsFearGratitudeSafetyImmigrationPatriotismImmigrantsCountriesLove Of Country
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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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?”

WarDeathFearColonialismJustificationsProportional Response
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.”

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