The acclaimed author and journalist Omar El Akkad discusses his new book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (McClelland & Stewart, 2025), with Joseph Planta.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (McClelland & Stewart, 2025). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Text of the introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.  

Omar El Akkad joins me again. The bestselling author and reporter has just published a new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It’s a powerful book, where the author chronicles how his own life fits within the narratives of the worlds he inhabits, as a son of immigrants, as a father, as a citizen, and whether it’s journalism in Canada, living in the United States, being a writer; he speaks truth to power. This book is described as a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn’t consider you fully human. The title of the book is adapted from a tweet Omar put out in October 2023, three weeks after the bombardment of Gaza. Going back from then he reflects on his work as a journalist, a career he began in university just after September 11, 2001. He takes the timeline of then and now, and provides examples of how he views the West as no longer to be trusted to police the world, morally or otherwise. I’ll ask Omar about the writing of the book, and the conclusions he comes to, deeply personal ones that calls into question home, as well as electoral politics, the media, and what it means to be an artist. Omar El Akkad has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He’s been on the program in the past for his previous novels, American War, and What Strange Paradise. Both were bestsellers and critically acclaimed. This new book is published by McClelland & Stewart. We spoke one week ago, with Omar joining me from Toronto. Please welcome back to the Planta: On the Line program, Omar El Akkad; Mr. El Akkad, good morning.  

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