“One day, everyone will have always been against this” by Omar El Akkad

What is empathy worth if it never leads to accountability or action? 

This is a memoir, a critique, and a necessary read. Omar El Akkad shows how empathy often stops at performance, how journalism can name violence with precision yet turns vague when Western allies are responsible, and how colonialism persists beneath polite denials. (I’d like to continue by saying “no surprise there”, but after what’s gone of 2025, I’ve seen how to many it is surprising to learn that the North never really stopped their colonial behaviors.) 

Taking us through his life in Egypt, Qatar, and North America, El Akkad takes apart the myth of a virtuous “North” and exposes the comfort and/or convenience of the silence surrounding atrocities in Gaza and beyond. His reflections resonated in unexpected ways: growing up in Guatemala, I too was taught that the North was the ultimate goal—the good, the best, the aim. After nearly a decade living there, I’d tell my younger self the world is both more fascinating and more disheartening than I was led to believe, and that I’d been offered only partial truths (good thing we can all open our minds and read things outside our ingrained views and comfort zones, can’t we?). 

El Akkad warns that “one day, when it’s safe … everyone will have always been against this,” in a similar way to how many people today show respect to resistance movements of the past…but not while they happen. This resonates, again, having grown up in a white-passing family and a mostly racist city that thought “less” of the indigenous movements and other forms of resistance in Guatemala’s recent history. Or with how many people say today “they would not have been silent in 1930s-1940s Germany”, but there’s nothing but crickets now…? 

El Akkad writes a powerful reminder that moral clarity matters now, not later. This book gave me words to feelings and ideas I’d sensed but couldn’t articulate. It’s unsettling, eye-opening, and essential.