Prize winning author Omar El Akkad told an overflow crowd at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on March 6th that it is the responsibility of authors to deal with beauty without censoring out uglyness. “Ignoring genocide is a threshold I will not cross”, he said. Read more…

Just three weeks after the start of the massive bombardment of Gaza, prize winning author 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.” His tweet was viewed over 10 million times.

At his publisher’s urging, that tweet became the title of El Akkad’s his most recent book “One day everyone will always have been against this”. It was also the subject of a talk he gave at the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival Audience.

El Akkad made a powerful emotional and moral appeal to the many aspiring writers in the audience. Writing about beautiful things, like birds and love is wonderful, Akkad asserted, but writers should not shy away from writing about the universe as it really is, including its ugly bits.

El Akkad, who was born in Egypt but grew up in Canada, writes as an Arab man, who once looked up to the West and its claimed attachment to human rights and international law. But now living in America, and watching the US-supported nonstop Israeli assault on Gaza, he now doubts how real the attachment is to those high-minded principles.

Akkad’s novel is infused with passion and emotion, calling out the hypocrisies of the West and its complicity in the violence against Palestinians in Gaza. Through the novel, El Akkad also examines his own role as journalist and author in the workings of the West.

Akkad pays special attention to the craft of writing (in addition to being an author, he teaches creative writing), including the use of language to shape understanding. He expresses frustration with how politicians and journalists find euphemisms for words like “genocide” and “torture”. “Ignoring genocide is a threshold I will not cross”, he said. “The word carries with it an obligation to prevent.”

El Akkad asserts that just as we today agree on to call the Holocaust a genocide, or call for “Truth and Reconciliation” for our treatment of indigenous peoples, at some point in the future it will be acceptable to call out the genocide in Gaza. At that point, Western society will try to claim they didn’t know the extent of what was happening. Not true, he says. People in the West could’ve known, but too many looked away. What is needed, he argues, is the courage to call out these things while they are happening.

Prime Minister Carney seemed to have that courage for a few minutes at a campaign event when a heckler asked him if he knew there was a “genocide” in Gaza, Carney responded “I’m aware, and that is why we have blocked military sales to Israel”. But Carney’s courage did not last long. Under pressure from Israel and the Israel lobby he quickly backed down, struggling to find a way to not use the word “genocide” after all.

El Akkad said “One of the infuriating effects of the last 19 months is the feeling that one is going mad. I’m seeing something horrific but I have to align myself with it in some way or just look away. ” Western viewers try to “look away” by ignoring the mountain of documentation (provided by Israelis themselves) of soldiers taking their revenge on Palestinian civilians living in Gaza.

El Akkad is just as powerful and articulate a speaker as he is a writer, as can be seen in this recent interview with Mehdi Hassan.

Canada Talks Israel Palestine (CTIP) is the weekly newsletter of Peter Larson, Chair of the Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine (OFIP). It aims to promote a serious discussion in Canada about Canada’s response to the complicated and emotional Israel/Palestine issue with a focus on the truth, clear analysis and human rights for all. Readers with different points of view are invited to make comment.
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