58 pages • 1-hour read
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, graphic violence, physical abuse, and racism.
Introduction Summary: “She Is Fog-Colored…”
The essay collection opens with a scene of a young girl being rescued from bombed ruins. The child, bloodied and disoriented, believes she has died as men carry her away on a stretcher. El Akkad uses this narrative to introduce a discussion about violence, sharing insights from a former soldier about how explosion blast waves kill and how distance offers the only real protection. This parallels the soldier’s personal revelation that his most terrifying experience was not combat but rushing his injured toddler to an emergency room, highlighting how personal connection transforms an individual’s relationship to suffering.
El Akkad then examines language as a tool of power, contrasting the physical barriers surrounding conflict zones with the “fortress of language” that allows violence to be sanitized and justified (5). He argues that manipulative language primarily serves not extremists but the “well-meaning” “middle” who need linguistic distance to accept violence as necessary (5). Throughout the introduction, El Akkad emphasizes the limitations of translation to convey cultural meaning, which is illustrated when a rescuer tells the girl she is “like the moon” (6)—a phrase carrying emotional resonance that transcends literal translation. The Introduction concludes with the observation that when something has ended, something else begins—the dead continue to influence the living. Similarly, El Akkad’s book will explore how past violence and trauma continue to shape present realities and identities.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Departure”
In Chapter 1, El Akkad juxtaposes his present life in rural Oregon, where his young daughter constructs an imaginary city in their hallway, with the violent realities that have shaped his identity. He observes the stark contrast between his daughter’s stable American childhood and his fragmented upbringing across multiple countries. El Akkad admits a reluctance to connect his children with their Egyptian heritage, partly to spare them the burden of dual identity that has complicated his own life—from mispronounced names to expectations that he represent entire ethnic and religious groups.
El Akkad recalls his childhood in Qatar during the 1990 Gulf War, describing how shocking images of violence quickly became normalized. He details his father’s departure from Egypt following a threatening encounter with soldiers during martial law after President Sadat’s assassination. This incident crystallized for El Akkad a fundamental insight about power: that rules and morals exist only as long as they serve those in power. After a failed attempt to relocate to Libya, his father secured work in Qatar solely for its financial prospects, knowing nothing about the country itself.
The author reflects on two formative experiences from his youth in Qatar: witnessing a wealthy local man assault a South Asian driver while bystanders, including himself, merely laughed; and living with omnipresent censorship that left books, music albums, and films heavily redacted. These experiences shaped his idealization of the West as the inverse of all the things he disliked about the Middle East—a place he imagined offered fundamental freedoms and fairness under law. Despite later witnessing Western violence against people who shared his ethnicity and religion during the War on Terror, El Akkad maintained faith that Western liberalism’s “cracks could be fixed” (23).
The chapter concludes with El Akkad’s response to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza beginning in October 2023, which he views as the breaking point in his belief in Western moral principles. After describing the Hamas attack that killed 1,195 Israelis, and Israel’s subsequent military response—which he characterizes as “a campaign of active genocide against the Palestinian people,” enacted “with the support of the majority of the Western world’s political power centers” (23)—he argues that the Western reaction to this crisis revealed the hollowness of liberal values and rules-based order. El Akkad sees this moment as a “severance” for an entire generation who previously believed in Western ideals, but are now forced to recognize that these principles primarily serve to preserve existing power structures.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Witness”
El Akkad recounts how he and his family immigrated from Qatar to Montreal, Canada, when he was 16 years old. He contrasts Qatar’s extreme heat with Montreal’s bitter winter cold. El Akkad observes that immigration’s most profound impact is psychological rather than geographical. While Westerners in Qatar enjoyed elevated status, expanded opportunities, and household staff, his family experienced diminishment upon moving to Canada, with his father’s professional credentials becoming worthless. El Akkad writes about enduring ignorant comments from classmates, witnessing people speaking louder to his parents, and experiencing general alienation that caused him to seek anonymity by wandering around downtown Montreal and university campuses. His high school had an arrangement with Concordia University that allowed the students to borrow books, and after hearing about William Burroughs’s controversial novel Naked Lunch from a friend, El Akkad went to the library, feeling genuinely afraid to request it. The fact that the librarian was completely disinterested in his request sparked a realization about Western freedoms: Despite his experiences of marginalization, El Akkad appreciated accessing uncensored literature and films. This experience solidified his belief in Western societies’ commitment to their principles of freedom, providing an anchor during this adjustment period and his later journalism career.
El Akkad joined his college newspaper shortly after the September 11 attacks, sensing the world had fundamentally changed and wanting to document it. He then secured an internship at the Globe and Mail, which was to be his professional home for the next decade. Before his first assignment in Afghanistan in 2007, he underwent a week-long hazardous environment training program led by former special operations soldiers, beginning with a simulated ambush and kidnapping. The training included combat first aid instruction, directional orientation exercises, and discussions on handling devastating hypothetical scenarios like the sexual assault of colleagues—all preparing journalists for environments where normal societal rules no longer apply.
El Akkad contrasts his idealistic motivation for war reporting—telling consequential stories that would otherwise go untold—with journalism’s harsh realities: poor compensation, demanding schedules, and increasing job insecurity. He examines tensions between objectivity and activism in journalism, noting that while reporters theoretically should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (39), institutional practices often prevent advocacy for justice. El Akkad identifies a problematic double standard: Western journalists openly supported Ukraine against Russia and condemned journalist Evan Gershkovich’s detention in Russia while maintaining an artificial “neutrality” regarding Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
El Akkad examines how false narratives about atrocities can be weaponized to justify military action. He references reports of “beheaded babies” that emerged following the Hamas attacks on October 7th, which quickly escalated into claims of “forty beheaded babies” despite lacking verification (36). He connects this to a pattern in conflict journalism where initial shocking claims—even unsubstantiated ones—shape public opinion during critical early periods of violence. He draws a parallel to the false reports of uranium that helped build support for the Iraq War, which resulted in approximately a million deaths. El Akkad argues that this psychological mechanism allows for the moral justification of extreme military responses by dehumanizing the enemy, ultimately enabling the public to accept large-scale violence that might otherwise be considered unconscionable.
El Akkad also criticizes modern political journalism’s focus on “horse-race” coverage rather than substantive policy analysis, arguing this approach creates false equivalences between rational positions and extremist views while reducing complex moral issues to polling statistics. Despite these industry failures, he highlights Palestinian journalists’ exceptional courage in Gaza in the face of devastating personal losses, noting that by July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists had been killed—an unprecedented death toll for media professionals in a single conflict. The chapter concludes with El Akkad reflecting on the ethics of Western officials: He specifically references U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s hypocritical social media post, which lamented journalist casualties even though Blinken supported Israel’s military actions that caused many of those deaths.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
The theme of Sanitized Language as a Shield for Empire emerges early as El Akkad dissects how terminology distances people from moral responsibility. He critiques language that transforms violence into passive occurrences, writing that the empire exists “cocooned inside its own fortress of language” (5). This linguistic manipulation serves to normalize violence against certain populations, making it appear inevitable rather than the result of specific political choices. El Akkad argues that this sanitized terminology isn’t primarily for extremists but for “the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle” (5), allowing them to rationalize atrocities as regrettable necessities. The sanitization of language thus becomes a mechanism for moral evasion, allowing those who benefit from empire to maintain their self-image as ethical actors.
El Akkad structures his narrative by alternating between immediate documentation of violence and his personal history of displacement, creating a textual scaffolding that connects past and present injustices. His description of growing up as an immigrant, first in Qatar and then in Canada, establishes his position as simultaneous insider and outsider to Western culture. His childhood memories serve as more than biographical background—they function as a lens through which he examines larger patterns of power, privilege, and marginalization. El Akkad’s description of his father’s experience with arbitrary power in Egypt becomes emblematic of how authoritarianism itself functions. He writes: “Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable” (15). This observation extends beyond specific political regimes to become a framework through which he portrays how power operates globally.
The theme of The Moral Vacancy of Western Liberalism develops as El Akkad contrasts his childhood belief in Western freedom with his adult disillusionment. He describes how, growing up in the Middle East, he idealized “the part of the world where [he] believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom” (22). This belief sustained him even as he witnessed contradictions: “It remained even during the War on Terror years where, first as a college student, and then for ten years as a journalist, [he] saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine” (23). The fracturing of this belief forms the book’s central narrative arc, tracking how the author’s relationship to Western liberalism transforms from idealization to rejection. El Akkad portrays Western liberalism not as a coherent moral system but as “something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self” (26). He argues that this ultimately makes it compatible with supporting systems of oppression.
El Akkad’s experiences as a journalist provide a professional context for exploring institutional complicity in violence. His account of hazardous environment training reveals the normalization of violence within journalistic practice, preparing reporters to function within environments where “the rules of the reasonable world melt away” (35). The detailed description of simulated kidnapping establishes journalism’s complicated relationship with witnessing trauma. El Akkad connects his personal journey to larger questions about journalism’s moral obligations, critiquing the profession’s claimed neutrality as a form of moral abdication. He argues that journalism “at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is” (40), creating a fundamental tension with the industry’s insistence on political detachment.
The theme of Future Disavowal of Present Complicity appears in El Akkad’s discussion of how atrocities are reported and remembered. He notes that “in time, there will be nothing particularly controversial about using these words to describe the things they were created to describe” (25), claiming that moral clarity often arrives only after violence has ended. He identifies a pattern in which society refrains from naming ongoing atrocities to avoid obligations to intervene, only to express retrospective outrage once sufficient time has passed. El Akkad examines how present moral compromises are later disavowed: “Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away” (25). This observation connects to the book’s title, which suggests that eventually, everyone will claim to have opposed actions they currently support or tolerate. By examining moral positioning, El Akkad argues that collective memory reconstructs historical complicity to preserve societal self-image.
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