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Omar El Akkad Quotes

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Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

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