AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our interview with Omar El Akkad, the award-winning author and journalist. His book is just out, called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s also the author of two novels, the most recent titled What Strange Paradise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Omar, thank you so much for staying with us for Part 2 of our conversation. We’re speaking to you in Portland, Oregon, about this remarkable book of yours, just out, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

So, if you could — I’m going to quote you back to yourself again, just because your writing is so beautiful and you put things so precisely and also poetically. You say, “What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thinking it serves and said: I want nothing to do with this. Here, then,” by which you mean this book, “Here, then, is an account of an ending.” If you could take it from there?

OMAR EL AKKAD: So, a few weeks ago, I was on the road doing the book tour, and I was talking to a friend of mine, a writer who works at one of these universities that’s been targeted by the Trump administration. And he said something that has stuck with me. He said one of the most dangerous things about this moment is that it requires people of extraordinary talent, of extraordinary bravery, of extraordinary intelligence, and that a lot of our institutions simply don’t have that. At the top level, at the administrative level, a lot of our institutions, be they academic, cultural, journalistic, have, instead, the sort of people who are very well versed in soliciting donations, very well versed at not rocking the boat, but not particularly well versed at standing up to a power center that is trying to essentially strip the civic fabric for parts.

And this, I think, relates to this idea of an account of an ending, because everywhere I go, I am meeting people who are so disillusioned with how these institutions have behaved and how little resistance there is to what appears to be a sort of wholesale dismantling of the civic good, that they are simply saying, “I want nothing to do with this anymore.”

And so, to me, this book that sort of — you know, I know that it barges in through the door pretending to want to pick a bunch of fights. I don’t think of it as an argumentative book. I think of it as a book sort of nestled in a deep uncertainty, because I don’t know what’s on the other side of this. All I know is that there are certain load-bearing beams that previously I would have had so much faith in, that today, and especially as a result of the last year and a half, I quite simply don’t.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Because, I mean, you say in the book, as well, I mean, you worked — you’re a journalist, as well, and you started by reporting from not only Afghanistan, but also Guantánamo. But even though in those, both those cases, there were clear contraventions of international law, of the rules-based order, which you talk about in this book, and of which what’s come since October 7th, 2023, obviously, it’s much more stark, the betrayals — but what is it about this particular moment that made you break with this ideal of the West that covering the “war on terror” for over a decade did not?

OMAR EL AKKAD: I mean, to me, it comes down to three things: intimacy, immediacy and complicity.

There’s a story I often go back to about covering Guantánamo Bay. We were touring one of the prison camps, and I was asking the soldier who was giving us the tour. I said something like, “So, when do the prisoners” — and he immediately cut me off, and he said, “We don’t have prisoners here, sir. We have detainees.” And it was very, very important to this entire endeavor that there be no prisoners here, because a prisoner implies a prison sentence, and that’s something somebody has to define. A detainee, you can hold forever.

And there’s moments like that interspersed throughout my 10 years of journalism which happened in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and sort of the most heated years of the “war on terror” era. But one of the things I was able to do throughout that time is sort of compartmentalize each of these moments and say, “Well, this is just happening here, and this is just happening to these people.”

And that eventually falls apart. And it falls apart over the last year and a half, because there’s an immediacy to the grotesqueness that you’re watching. You’re watching, essentially, what is the world’s first live-streamed genocide. These things are happening in front of you every day. There’s an intimacy to it. You’re not watching grainy, sort of overhead footage from a drone. You are watching these things up close, and you are watching what shrapnel does to a child. And then there’s the complicity: I’m doing this. I am killing those kids. My tax money is doing this.

And so, the combination of those three things essentially takes away a kind of cowardice that I had afforded myself leading up to this, where I could compartmentalize each of these moments in the past. That fell apart over the last year and a half, and it has changed who I am as a person, because I’ve had to unanchor myself from certain modes of being. But I have no idea who I am on the other side of that. I don’t know who I become, now that so many of these things that I had oriented myself towards feel like they have failed me or are no longer places or ideas in which I can find refuge.

AMY GOODMAN: Omar, you were born in Egypt. You grew up in Qatar. During your teen years, you lived in Canada. And now we’re speaking to you in Portland, Oregon, near where you live with your family and your two little children. You recount early on in the book an experience your father had with an Egyptian soldier when he was stopped, and you were there. And you say that that incident anchors your overarching view of political malice, an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Can you talk about that experience, describe it to us, and then tell us especially how it informs what you see unfolding in Gaza today?

OMAR EL AKKAD: So, in the parts of the world where I grew up, there’s a kind of distinction of import in what I would consider to be a functioning society at a political level. The office is more important than the office holder. The principles are more important than whoever is enforcing the principles at any given moment. And I grew up, or the first 16 years of my life took place, in countries where the exact opposite was true. Whoever occupied the office of the president was more important than the office of the president. Whoever was charged with enforcing the Constitution was more important than the constitutional principles, and so on and so forth.

And I think, to me, when we talk about the sort of international, rules-based order, or whatever you want to call it, that kind of framework cannot function unless it functions for everyone and unless it’s more important than whoever is applying it and whoever it’s being applied to. And look, I understand that we live in a country where it’s very, very easy to look away from a place like Gaza, and there’s essentially no consequence to it. But part of this book tour that I’ve been on has been outside of the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve done a lot of traveling over the last year or so, and it’s very difficult for me to explain the amount of rage I see when I go elsewhere in the world and I talk to people.

And that rage is coming from one place in particular. It is coming from a place where that person, that group of people, that society can no longer believe that these rules, this order, this idea of certain principles or norms that are applicable to everybody are actually applicable to everybody, because they are seeing war crimes every single day, and they are seeing none of these rules and none of these norms and none of this order being applied to prevent or punish these obvious, obvious violations.

And again, you know, you can be insulated in the part of the world I live in, and not have to think about any of this, and there’s very little consequence to it. But elsewhere in the world, that’s not the case. And there’s an immense rage building up. It’s building up precisely because there’s a sense that when push comes to shove, none of these rules, none of these norms, none of this order is actually worth a damn.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Omar, do you see that kind of rage reflected anywhere within the U.S. or in Canada, but in the U.S. in particular, perhaps not at the institutional level, but maybe at the individual and community level, as you talk about towards the end of the book, the kind of resistance that U.S. complicity, enabling of this war has generated in the U.S.?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Absolutely. I mean, I see it on two fronts. The first has been ongoing for a year and a half, and it’s been in the active resistance to all of this that you’re seeing in university campuses, and you’re seeing when people chain themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers. There has been immense resistance. It has just come at a grassroots level, and it’s come as a result of communal solidarity, as opposed to at the institutional level.

And then, the second place you’re seeing it is more recently, because for the longest time, the central sales proposition of allowing this grotesqueness to continue is that it’s happening to those people over there. And, of course, there is no such thing as those people, and there is no such thing as over there. And now you’re watching so many of the mechanisms be used much, much closer to home. This notion of, “Hey, we can’t do anything about this because it’s happening all the way over there,” can be applied to Palestinians. It can also be applied to people who are disappeared off the streets and yanked to a prison camp in El Salvador. So many of the mechanisms that were previously sold as applying only to a specific group of individuals now, as is the case every moment like this in history, are no longer being applied to a certain group of individuals. They are being used wholesale, and, unless resisted, are going to continue to be exploited.

The central sort of differentiating factor between this administration and the previous one, for me, is that this one has no qualms about making a distinction between how it wants to be seen and what it’s actually doing. And so, that is inspiring an immense amount of rage. The question then becomes: Does that rage translate into substantial resistance, not only at the community level, but at the institutional level, where there are resources and there’s a kind of power that can keep these forces in check, in a way that someone chaining themselves to the gates of a weapons manufacturer on their own simply can’t do?

AMY GOODMAN: Omar, I wanted to go back to a question I asked you in Part 1 of our discussion, about journalists, because what is happening in Gaza to journalists is so absolutely horrifying, and we didn’t really give you enough time to draw the comparison. You had talked about Evan Gershkovich, who was held for a year and a half by Russia, and the global outrage at that, and the number of journalists in Gaza who have been killed. You agreed with the criticism of Russia holding Gershkovich. But if you can elaborate more fully on how the world responds to him, or, I should say, the West, and what is happening in Gaza, and understanding the full effect of wiping out so many hundreds of journalists there?

OMAR EL AKKAD: I mean, look, I think part of it is just plain racism. I think, you know, this happens a lot of times when a U.S. citizen is killed overseas, and then you read the name, and it happens to be an Arab name, it happens to be a Muslim name, and there’s the distinction there of whose life is worth more. I think that’s a function that can’t be sort of discounted.

But I think the other part of this has to do with the gap between how we think about journalism in a vacuum and how we think about journalism under the actual pressures that most journalists have to behave under. And by “pressures,” I mean the risk of losing on advertising, the risk of having your career sidelined, the risk of getting yelled at in the comments section, all of these things.

And I think in a case where there is a journalist who is imprisoned by a country that is not a U.S. ally, for which there are fewer institutional repercussions for criticizing that nation, all of those things function into how that story is presented, whereas to hold the same kind of standards to a journalist in Gaza suddenly involves far more pressure, not the least of which being the possibility that, “Well, maybe this person was a member of Hamas. Can we really be sure? Do I want to be the person who goes out on a limb and stands up for this journalist, and then they turn out not to be a journalist?” All of these pressures warp how the story is told.

And look, that’s been the case since time immemorial for every journalist related to every story. But I think it’s incumbent on reporters to think about the gap between how they would tell that story absent these pressures and how they tell the story with those pressures in place, because that gap, for me, is the definition of journalistic malpractice. And it’s one thing if you’re covering the newest iPhone launch. It’s another thing entirely when you’re talking about the wholesale killing of hundreds of your own colleagues, and how you present that and how you think about that.

But that’s not an easy thing, and I don’t say that with the expectation that most reporters don’t know exactly what’s going on. They do. But they’re also working within a system that imposes immense, immense pressure on them. And this is — none of this is easy, but that doesn’t make the right thing and the wrong thing any less distinct.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Omar, I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier with respect to this administration, the Trump administration, and the previous Biden administration. This book came out just weeks after Trump assumed office. So, can I just ask you, on the basis of the analysis that you’ve presented in the book itself about the Republican and the Democratic Party, saying, for instance, that “one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it”? So, first of all, were you surprised by the fact that Trump won? How much of the vote for him was a vote against Biden — or, indeed, no vote at all? Another point that you make in the book is that for all of the disagreements and points of contention between the two parties, it seems, as you write, it is the case of Palestinian suffering, or, more precisely, utter indifference to it, where the two sides seem to be most in agreement.

OMAR EL AKKAD: I mean, I think, for me, there is no real question as to which of the two central parties in this country is worse on almost every issue. That’s never been particularly difficult to discern. I think one of the frustrating things for me is that so many of the rhetorical tools that I saw employed by the previous administration over the last year and a half are now being weaponized so readily and to such an extreme extent by the current administration. This idea of clamping down on campus protesters, for example, which was presented in such a rhetorically dishonest way by the previous administration, has now been exploited to the extent where you’re watching people get snatched off the street.

I think that we are in a very, very dangerous — and, I mean, this is one hell of an understatement, but it’s a very dangerous moment in this country right now. And we happen to live in a country where it’s, effectively, at the federal level, a two-party system. And so, what I need from the party that is resisting this is to actually do some resisting, right? You can’t send me the fundraising email telling me that this current Republican administration is an existential threat to democracy, and then show me in practice that the extent to which you are willing to resist that is by wearing pink suit jackets to the State of the Union address, or something like that.

It’s not that I expect the same thing of both parties, and it’s not that I have a qualm with anybody who’s going to vote for the lesser evil every time. You go ahead and vote for whoever you want. It’s just that we are in a moment where I need so much more from the one of the two parties that is supposed to stand up to this, because I am a writer nobody has ever heard of, and what I do is minuscule compared to what an institutional power center in this country can do. And I think that’s where a lot of the dissolution is coming from. You can’t tell me time and time again that we’re in this moment that is existential and central to the future of the republic and the future of democracy, and then, when it comes time to put this rhetoric into practice, suddenly pull back and offer me nothing but this sort of very mild, centrist, reheated ideology and practice over and over again. That’s simply not going to win, and it’s a large part of the reason why we’re in the position we’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, Omar, if you can go through the trajectory of your reporting to your writing, to your writing novels, and then today, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, this book of reflection, you could almost say of poetry — it is so profound — going from reporting on the “war on terror,” Guantánamo, Afghanistan, reporting now, reflecting on what’s happening in Gaza, the language that’s used, and then, ultimately, why you feel this is your most hopeful book?

OMAR EL AKKAD: I think anyone who’s engaged in the work of literature, the work of writing, is ultimately trying to say something about what it means to be human. And so, I think when you’re of that disposition, you’re naturally going to find it extremely jarring to be in any kind of moment where you are watching someone’s humanity be taken away from them. And so, this is the impulse to write about anything. So this is the thing that connects my fiction, my journalism, my nonfiction, my creative nonfiction. All of it goes back to that place.

I don’t know where we go from here. I genuinely don’t know. But writing is the only way that I sort of make sense of the world. And right now the world seems to make very, very little sense. And so, that’s the orientation of how I think about the work I do. But especially in the last year and a half, I found myself coming back to this question of whether any of this is worth anything. You know, I think, as a writer, you need to believe in your mind that the work you’re doing is going to change the world, while deep down knowing that it probably won’t. But nonetheless, this is the only way I know how to make sense of the world, and so I go back to the page in the hope that I can do something to counteract this stripping away of humanity that has become so rampant in terms of how we think about one another.

And to me, as long as that work is happening, as long as we’re engaging in it, that’s a fundamentally hopeful thing, no matter how dystopian the moment we may be living in. The fact that we reach out and try to communicate with one another and try to find that humanity is, at the very least, a basis on which we can build something bigger.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Omar, just finally, you know, towards the end of the book, you talk about the different kinds of resistance that we’ve seen in the last two years, and why you think this resistance is so necessary, both the different kinds, negative and active. If you could elaborate on the two different kinds and where you see this resistance the most — let’s see, the most flourishing, where it’s occurring, what centers it’s happening in now, from universities to cultural institutions? Where do you see this taking shape?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tend to think of active resistance as actively participating in resistance, so going and protesting at these weapons manufacturers, showing up and shutting down train stations and doing that kind of work, which, to be perfectly honest, the vast majority of the time is being done by people far more courageous than I’ll ever be. And I think of negative resistance as the refusal to participate, the refusal to buy certain products or to engage with certain institutions because there’s a complicity involved in that, and because the only way to get these institutions to change is to withhold your labor or to withhold your dollars, and so on and so forth. And I think all of this is necessary, active resistance and negative resistance.

And the ways that I have seen this happen, especially over the last year and a half, are to me the central source of hopefulness. There are many days where I wake up and I am extremely dejected about what we’ve allowed to happen and the kind of society we’ve allowed to form. And then I watch these folks doing this work. I watch students at some of the most prestigious universities on this continent risk everything, risk their futures, risk their college degrees, risk their physical safety, to protest on behalf of the people who can offer them nothing in return. That is an incredibly courageous thing. And courage, like cowardice, is contagious.

And so, to me, as dejected as I’ve become about so many of the institutional load-bearing beams of this part of the world, be they academic, cultural, political, journalistic, you name it, I have been so inspired by what people are willing to do, individually and in community with one another. That, to me, has been one of the most inspiring moments of my life, is to watch this unfold against incredible odds. And so I derive immense hope from that, even at times that feel otherwise almost completely hopeless.

AMY GOODMAN: Omar El Akkad, I want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning author and journalist. His latest book is just out. It’s titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. Omar joined us from Portland, Oregon. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.