The book “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad is a scorching, timely examination of Western moral convenience—told by a reporter/novelist who has watched euphemism, centrism, and power eclipse truth in real time.
Power prefers our memories tidy; One Day Everyone k shows how a culture makes atrocities palatable by waiting until it’s safe to say it was always against them.
As El Akkad frames it, hindsight can be a “fiction of moral convenience,” a story told so we never have to change.
El Akkad argues that Western institutions—media, politics, culture—repeatedly launder state violence through euphemism and “both-sides” centrism, then later retrofit history to claim universal opposition, leaving the harmed to pay the moral debt.
Evidence
In 2024 a record 124 journalists were killed worldwide, with nearly 70% killed by Israel during its war in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
CPJ also found 82 journalists killed in Gaza in 2024 alone; major outlets confirmed the unprecedented toll.
One Day Everyone itself reports, “As of July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed.”
El Akkad’s firsthand reporting spans Guantánamo Bay courtrooms with delayed audio feeds and blacked-out motions, to Cairo during the Arab Spring, to the “Toronto 18” terror case—each showing how language shapes what the public is allowed to see.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
El Akkad’s title alone is an incision: “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” It’s the slogan of a future self-absolving posterity.
He is an Egyptian-born journalist/novelist (author of American War and What Strange Paradise) who has covered war, migration, and political extremism. The book is essayistic narrative nonfiction—ten sections from “Departure” to “Arrival.”
It was first published in 2025 (UK: Canongate; US: Knopf), with Canongate listing ISBN 9781837264186 (print) and 9781837264254 (eBook).
El Akkad states the problem plainly: our culture venerates resistance only when it’s too late for the victims; in real time, power enforces euphemism. He writes that the retrospective arc praising the colonized is “a fiction… of moral convenience.”
2. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Summary
El Akkad’s book is a braided work of reportage, memoir, and media criticism that asks a sharp question: how do powerful states and their allied institutions launder present-tense violence into the safe hindsight where “everyone will have always been against this”?
The answer unfolds across ten linked sections—Departure, Witness, Values, Language, Resistance, Craft, Lesser Evils, Fear, Leavetaking, and Arrival—and moves from Gaza to Guantánamo Bay to Toronto newsrooms, tracing how euphemism, “both-sides” rituals, and access politics smuggle moral evasion into the news we read and the histories we later tell.
The whole arc in one sweep
One Day Everyone opens with an intimate, cinematic scene: rescuers carrying a dazed, bloodied girl out of a bombed home; a voice nearby asks God for revenge. That scene—grief set against the empire’s “fortress of language”—is the frame for everything that follows: language can turn murder into “clashes,” can make buildings “collapse of their own volition,” and can transform a people’s testimony into noise.
From there, El Akkad maps three interlocking arguments. First, the media’s centrism is not a neutral posture; it is a technique that dissolves truth. Articles “pretzel” themselves into parity between evidence and propaganda, offering M-copy backgrounders that balance an aggressor’s action with an “offsetting” act by the other side, and calling it nuance. Good journalism, he says, should have no interest in any of this.
Second, state secrecy and national-security courts manufacture ignorance. In Guantánamo Bay, reporters sit behind glass with a delayed audio feed that can be muted; names are replaced by rank and initial; hearsay is allowed. In one case, censors even blacked out a New York Times article attached to a court motion—proof that the point of secrecy is often power itself. “Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable.”
Third, Gaza lays bare the cost of euphemism. With foreign media largely blocked, “Palestinian reporters are in effect the world’s sole source of information” about the obliteration, and the price has been “everything”—El Akkad registers at least 108 Palestinian journalists killed by July 2024. He names Al Jazeera’s Wael al-Dahdouh, whose family was killed in a strike; he returned to report the next day, was wounded, and kept reporting.
Across these threads, his immigrant biography and newsroom years supply the ground truth: the Toronto 18 case shows how the label “terrorism” torques journalism into suspicion, while the beat itself absorbs and reproduces social distance from those most harmed.
Highlights
- Publication & structure (2025): UK Canongate / US Knopf; ten sections—Departure → Arrival—that move between scene, reflection, and argument to expose how retrospective moral consensus is built.
- Opening scene (Gaza, 2023–24): A nine- or ten-year-old girl is carried from rubble; the prose then pivots to the politics of words—how English flattens meanings like mashallah, and how imperial language turns killings into inevitabilities.
- Centrism as evasion: When one party acts in bad faith, “listing one position and then the other… fails entirely.” M-copy balances unequals; “Good journalism should have no interest in any of this.”
- Gaza’s press toll (as of July 2024): At least 108 Palestinian journalists killed; One Day Everyone argues that Western prize culture will “overlook” Gaza’s local reporters for fear of being labeled biased.
- Wael al-Dahdouh (Oct. 2023 and after): Family killed in a strike; he resumes work a day later, is wounded, and keeps reporting—an emblem of witness beyond Western access.
- Guantánamo Bay (2008): Reporters sit behind glass; audio on delay; hearsay permitted; a New York Times article is censored in a court motion. The point: secrecy produces an “empty canvas” onto which power paints any story.
- Omar Khadr (2008): A Canadian captured at 15, held in Gitmo for a decade awaiting trial—El Akkad covers his hearings across multiple trips, while guards tout “privileges” in Camp 4 and isolation in Camps 5–6.
- Uyghur detainees: Picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters, shipped to Gitmo despite early assessments that they posed no threat; international politics then block resettlement. The system’s inertia becomes its own indictment.
- Toronto 18 (2006–2008): A newsroom assigns El Akkad and a colleague—among the few with Middle Eastern backgrounds—to cover the case; sources and officials cast suspicion (“terrorist sympathizers” on payroll), illustrating how labels contort coverage.
- Language chapter: Words like “perish in a blast” and passive structures become a shield for power; contrast with coverage of atrocities by non-allies, where perpetrators are plainly named.
- Values chapter: Vivid scenes—amputations without anesthesia, children screaming—test the reader’s appetite for distance; El Akkad asks whether there is any distance large enough to absolve complicity.
- Resistance chapter (Feb. 2024): Aaron Bushnell self-immolates outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., saying “Free Palestine.” The narrative contrasts how Western punditry pathologizes his act with its earlier praise of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia. One Day Everyone articulates active and negative resistance and notes a U.S. veto of a Gaza ceasefire days earlier.
- Craft chapter: The industry’s economic pressures—layoffs, PR exits, rage-based business models—distort reporting; the profession demands neutrality while rewarding activism-by-results (public-service prizes). The contradiction breeds cognitive dissonance, especially when allies are perpetrators.
- Ethical double-speak (Dec. 2023): Secretary of State Antony Blinken posts about a deadly year for journalists while Washington arms the state killing the most journalists; El Akkad calls this “ethical double-jointedness.”
- Phantom realities: A list of mythologies about Palestinians—“they left willingly,” “there is no such thing as Palestinians”—shows how silence plus propaganda produces a counterfeit history that absolves perpetrators and gaslights the dead.
- Thesis crystallized: When every last local journalist is killed, power can claim there “have never been” journalists at all; without acts and language to describe them, we can be made to believe anything. That is how the future pretends it “was always against this.”
Section-by-section extended synthesis
One: Departure
A child with a bullet wound, a father’s voice, a Portland hallway—El Akkad moves between Gaza’s debris and his daughter’s paper city, revealing a book about love, distance, and the way language either restores lungs to the living or knocks the air out of them.
The key insight: language is not a container; it is an instrument. The empire’s idiom makes death feel natural—people “perish,” buildings “collapse,” violence “erupts”—and this idiom offers comfort to the “well-meaning, easily upset middle” that needs killing to be necessary in order for its self-image to remain clean.
Two: Witness
One Day Everyone moves to witnessing as labor: scenes of Gaza’s reporters doing the work foreign outlets cannot do, and the cost of that work. The focus tightens on Wael al-Dahdouh as emblem of witness in extremis. The line that matters most: “The price of reporting under these conditions is everything.” This section sets up the later claim that Western prize circuits will downplay local Gazan work to avoid the charge of bias, even as those journalists carry the world’s seeing.
Three: Values
Here El Akkad refuses the sterile frame: he lists the injuries—amputations without anesthesia; fathers’ shoes in children’s hands—and asks if any distance can truly make us “clean.”
Then he toggles to the political theater where statesmen lament press deaths in the abstract while enabling the conditions that produce them. This is where One Day Everyone articulates that the moral distance is performative; it exists to keep comfortable people comfortable.
Four: Language
Centrism is anatomized. When one political actor plays in bad faith, “listing claim and counterclaim” doesn’t inform; it misleads. Reporters twist themselves to create a “level field” between reality and fantasy; the result is absurdity. El Akkad thus translates a newsroom habit into a moral failure: balance is not truth.
Five: Resistance
One Day Everyone distinguishes active resistance (showing up, organizing, speaking) from negative resistance (refusing to participate in unjust systems). It uses Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation (Feb. 25, 2024, Washington, D.C.) to expose how Western discourse venerates distant dissidents (Bouazizi, 2010) yet pathologizes domestic dissent that threatens its moral self-image.
The U.S. veto of a Gaza ceasefire that same month provides geopolitical context. Together, these scenes form a manual for practice, not purity.
Six: Craft
Inside the newsroom, economics and culture bend coverage. The “neutral agitator” paradox persists: journalism prizes celebrate stories that change institutions, yet journalists are instructed not to “call for justice.” Rage-based business models (he names Fox as an example) are profitable precisely because they sever truth from content.
The chapter’s diagnosis: precarity plus PR capture plus culture-war incentives yield coverage that favors power, especially when the perpetrator is a Western ally.
Seven: Lesser Evils
This section returns to the courthouse and the war-on-terror bureaucracy. In Guantánamo Bay, the rules are engineered to accommodate secrecy: audio can be cut; hearsay qualifies; names dissolve into initials.
The censors’ decision to black out a New York Times clipping attached to a motion becomes a symbol of insatiable silence. The book broadens to detainees who pose “no threat at all” but languish for years because moving them is politically inconvenient. Injustice accumulates its own rationales.
Eight: Fear
Fear’s itinerary in the West has a totem: the terrorist. El Akkad’s Toronto 18 reporting becomes a case study in how fear and identity shape newsroom assignments and public reactions.
The detail that lingers—“I don’t trust any story about terrorism written by a guy named Omar”—exposes how credibility is racialized, and how fear can be cultivated through years of curated imagery and narrative grooming.
Nine: Leavetaking
Leavetaking is geographic and moral. From Egypt to Canada via Qatar; from idealism to disillusionment; from faith in institutions to a harder faith in people. The chapter’s undertone—family mourning, a father’s death—reorients the argument away from ideology and toward care as the engine of truth-telling. (This tonal seam runs through earlier family scenes.)
Ten: Arrival
“Arrival” is not a resolution but a stance. The closing thought returns to the title’s grammar—“One day, everyone will have always been against this.”
The warning is that if we permit euphemism, deference, and manufactured ignorance to rule, the future will erase the bravery it demands of us now.
The only antidote is language that names, witness that risks, and resistance that practices—so that when history gets repaved, the record still shows who stood where.
What the reader walks away with
- Language is power: Passive constructions, both-sides rituals, and “M-copy” are not stylistic tics; they are instruments that anesthetize publics and shield allies. “Good journalism should have no interest in any of this.”
- Secrecy manufactures reality: Guantánamo’s muted audio and censored filings prove how silence becomes a canvas onto which authorities paint whatever absolves them.
- Witness has a cost: Local journalists in Gaza pay with their lives while Western institutions hedge for reputational safety. The book’s running count—108 Palestinian journalists by July 2024—anchors its moral claim in material fact.
- Fear is curated: The Toronto 18 coverage shows how “terrorism” labels torque judgment, how identity marks who is trusted, and how monsters are made, not merely “materialized.”
- Resistance is practice: From Aaron Bushnell to encampments and boycotts, the book sets out active vs. negative resistance and observes that power knows how to punish action but is bewildered by refusal.
- Hindsight lies: The title’s future-perfect tense is the indictment. If we surrender present clarity, posterity will pretend it always had it. The only check on that vanity is to name perpetrators now, not after.
Bottom line
Read as one continuous argument, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This says: the stories we tell while people are dying decide what the future is allowed to remember. El Akkad’s chapters move us from rubble to courtroom to newsroom to street, showing in granular detail how language, secrecy, fear, and professional incentives converge to make atrocities livable for the comfortable and fatal for the already suffering.
If the future is to be honest, the work is now—to witness, to refuse euphemism, and to resist—so that not everyone can later claim they “have always been against this.”
3. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Analysis
He begins with a tableau: rescuers carrying a bloodied girl “fog-colored,” a scene of rubble and prayer—naming, then refusing to tidy the violence with passive constructions.
From there he moves to the mechanics of truth-avoidance: courts with delayed audio feeds in Guantánamo Bay where “hearsay is allowed,” and a military so in love with secrecy that it once redacted a New York Times article attached as an exhibit.
That anecdote is not just color; it’s an x-ray of power’s method—first monopolize language, then call the truth classified. He observes, “Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable.”
What makes this book singular is how it fuses memoir and media criticism without retreating to the lecture hall. Consider his section on the “Toronto 18,” when a prison official warned his editor that there were “terrorist sympathizers on the payroll” because El Akkad sought an interview. The weight of that label torqued everything.
He shows how centrist “scorekeeping” journalism fails when one side is acting in bad faith, twisting reporters into “pretzels” to sustain false parity between evidence and propaganda.
And he names what the euphemisms hide: Gaza, where Palestinian reporters—barred from international company because international reporters were barred from Gaza—have been “the world’s sole source of information” at a lethal cost.
4. Strengths and Weaknesses
What worked powerfully for me is how El Akkad collapses distance: Guantánamo Bay isn’t an abstract failure; it’s a place where the audio “can be muted” if someone says something the judges deem classified. That detail—mute the sound, control the meaning—rings across One Day Everyone.
I was moved—and quietly indicted—by his criticism of “centrism” as a moral identity rather than a method, producing articles that must place “Jewish space lasers” alongside epidemiology as though both are legitimate poles. It felt like someone finally accounting for the harm I’ve often waved away as “just tone.”
If there’s a weakness, it will be felt mainly by readers hoping for a step-by-step policy manual. El Akkad is not designing institutions; he is unmasking them. The closest he comes to prescription is in his discussion of resistance—active and negative—built like muscle, act by act.
5. Conclusion
I finished El Akkad’s book with the particular quiet that follows seeing something you thought you understood, but finally seeing the joints. The title’s grammar—“will have always been”—isn’t a flourish; it’s an accusation directed at our future selves who will pretend we were brave when it mattered.
Recommended for journalists, students, activists, and anyone who senses that “neutrality” too often means obedience to power. Not ideal for readers who prefer removed, bloodless analysis or who require bipartisan symmetry to feel comfortable.
So if you’re an editor, a reporter, or a citizen reader like me, this book is not a purity test; it’s a practice manual for naming. Start by refusing to pretend that “horse race” coverage is adequate to a world where “players kneecap their opponents in the locker room.” Then, insist that your newsroom—and your own consumption—stops confusing balance with truth.
You’ll also find that the book is generous to good journalism; El Akkad explicitly honors the exceptional work that cuts through propaganda in impossible conditions.
And if you need a single line to carry, carry this one: “Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable.”
