One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) | The Chris Hedges Report

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Feb 19, 2025

Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, discusses the moral shortcomings of industrialized nations regarding their treatment of Palestinians. He critiques the hypocrisy of land acknowledgments, highlighting how they often perpetuate colonial narratives. El Akkad also addresses the euphemistic language used in media which allows audiences to distance themselves from brutality. Central to the conversation is the tension between activism and journalism, underscoring how societal complicity shapes our understanding of suffering in conflicts.

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INSIGHT

Linguistic Violence

Western nations, especially the US, use language to mask atrocities committed against Palestinians.
This linguistic violence allows people to look away from the reality of genocide.

ANECDOTE

Guantanamo Bay Terminology

At Guantanamo Bay, soldiers used specific language like "detainees" instead of "prisoners" to manipulate perceptions.
This linguistic manipulation extends to other areas, like calling interrogations "reservations".

INSIGHT

Imaginative Poverty

The world's current state necessitates a certain imaginative poverty.
This allows for accusations and justifications of violence, simplifying complex issues into a binary of oppressor and oppressed.

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To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue are used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad writes about such instances in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. “You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,” he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. “We can all be sorry afterwards.”

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with “neutral,” unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says “What [they’re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,” El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

“I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.”