NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a
powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values
"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto."— The New York Times “I can’t think of a more important
piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here and help to face what the world is now
all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange
bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There On October 25 2023 after just three
weeks of the bombardment of Gaza Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day when it’s safe when
there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is when it’s too late to hold anyone
accountable everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than
10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West El Akkad believed that it promised
freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years reporting on the War on
Terror Ferguson climate change Black Lives Matter protests and more and watching the
unmitigated slaughter in Gaza El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West
promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never
intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants but whoever falls
outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a
chronicle of that painful realization a moral grappling with what it means as a citizen of
the U.S. as a father to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage. This is El
Akkad’s nonfiction debut his most raw and vulnerable work to date a heartsick breakup letter
with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the
United States in family rooms on college campuses on city streets the consequences of this
rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what
the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
