There are many ways to advance the Jihad against Israel. Beginning in the 1960s with the opening of the borders of the West to a large number of Arab and other Moslem immigrants, Israel’s enemies began producing polemical articles, books and other works making false claims about morality, human rights and international law. Such a work is Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a polemic against Israel and the West in which Mr. El Akkad, Egyptian-born and Qatar-raised, Canadian educated and now a U.S. citizen, repeatedly announces both his high moral purpose, his outrage at Israel and his status as a ‘brown’ person.
El Akkad’s heavy-handed and bitter tirade makes no attempt to state facts fairly or at all. The book would not have been worth reviewing had it not received the 2025 US National Book Award for non-fiction. That award was once considered a respectable prize, but is now often a bauble that activists give each other to advance the faddish cause of the moment.
El Akkad holds true to that usage of the award by stating three major themes in his book:
(1) Israel is committing genocide in Gaza by killing children, particularly little girls, and by killing journalists,
(2) The West is complicit in this supposed genocide and ought to prevent it or do more to stop it, and,
(3) El Akkad is a ‘brown’ person which, he claims, makes his life in the West more difficult but which he also seems to believe gives him special insight..
El Akkad also has some smaller themes in the book including that Democrats are hypocrites and Republicans fascists, capitalism is bad because it is based on self-interest and that a climate crisis looms which will kill us all.
El Akkad does have a hero in the book though. The hero is a U.S. Army reservist who immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. in February of 2024, only three and a half months into the Gaza War, as a protest against Israel.
To advance the Jihad in this book, El Akkad makes sure it is as fact-free as possible.
-In El Akkad’s Middle East, Jihadi killers, rapists and kidnappers, ideologically dedicated to wiping Israel off the map and killing or expelling all the Jews from the Middle East, are not explicitly mentioned.
-In El Akkad’s Middle East, Hamas has not been the government of Gaza for 16 years as of October, 2023 and has not received billions in foreign aid, most of which was applied to war-making and preparation for Jihad against Israel.
-In El Akkad’s Middle East Gaza did not fire thousands of rockets into Israel to kill Israeli civilians over those sixteen years.
-In El Akkad’s Middle East no Hamas terrorists, but only civilians were killed by Israel after October 7, 2023 and most of those civilians were children. No hospitals, schools or mosques were used for military purposes, everyone who claims to have been a ‘journalist’ in Gaza actually was one, there are no tunnels in Gaza, nor any Israeli hostages and the Israelis are completely to blame because they are ‘occupiers.’
El Akkad does not even attempt to justify the casual but total lie that he repeats throughout his book: that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He presents his lie as a ‘given’ as an obvious and proven fact instead of the dishonest polemical assertion that it is because that lie advances the Jihad. Briefly stated, genocide is the purposeful killing or attempt to kill an ethnic, religious or national group.
The truth: Israel has the capacity to kill all the Gazans, but not the desire. Many Gazans have the desire to kill all the Jewish Israelis, but not the ability.
The artificiality of El Akkad’s moral outrage at Israel is also displayed by how selective that outrage is. El Akkad worked as a reporter for about 10 years and has written two other books and spoken publicly many times. I cannot review everything he has said or written but my AI, Microsoft Co-pilot can do a reasonable approximation of a search. I asked it to find other instances where El Akkad had condemned governmental injustices, real ones like the Syrian slaughter of its own people in the Assad regime or the Communist Chinese oppression of Tibetans and Uyghurs. AI could not find any such instance of Akkad’s outrage.
There is a lot of injustice in the world and some small portion of all the injustice in the world, a portion commensurate with their small numbers and facts, may be Jewish injustice. But if the only injustice you are able to publicly denounce is Jewish injustice, you are likely a Jew-hating bigot.
In El Akkad’s view, the West is complicit in the non-existent genocide in Gaza because it does not do more to stop Israel:
To read El Akkad’s book you would not know that the entire unfree world, the collection of Moslem majority states, despots, tyrannies, juntas, communist and communist-allied countries and third world sewers denounce Israel for the War in Gaza.
To read El Akkad’s book you would not know that the Jew-hating government of Ireland, the degraded Leftist government of Spain and the weak-kneed, muddle-headed governments of Western countries constantly condemn Israel.
To read El Akkad you would not know that there is a well-funded, highly organized, Moslem and Leftist alliance to eliminate the little Jewish state and that eliminating Israel is an ideological centerpiece of the Jihadi and Leftist alliance.
To read El Akkad you would not know that Israel just wants to live in peace in its own borders and the Moslem world will not let it do so.
Producing a harangue about his own moral outrage leaves El Akkad free to ignore facts and condemn Israel and the West. By only discussing his moral outrage he can keep his book fact-free.
Multiple times El Akkad mentions that he is a ‘brown’ person and that brown people like him have a difficult time in the West and particularly in the U.S. He clearly recognizes that Egypt where he was born is a poverty-ridden military dictatorship, that Qatar where he spent part of his childhood and youth attending a private school is a theocratic cesspool that abuses foreign workers and does not distribute its petroleum wealth equitably, and that Canada is a nice enough place to live if you don’t mind the frosty weather.
Since El Akkad especially dislikes the U.S. for its alliance with Israel, condemns Democrats as hypocrites, Republicans as fascists, and calls the West an ‘empire’ that abuses brown people, it is reasonable to wonder why he applied for and obtained American citizenship. Could it be that in the U.S. he has both a level of prosperity and a level of freedom that he could not obtain in any other place in the world? And because If El Akkad lived in Egypt or Qatar and attacked those governments and societies the way he attacks the U.S., he would likely be in prison or dead?
Had El Akkad engaged the real issue, the real cause of the Gaza War, he would have had to talk about what is wrong in much of the Arab and Moslem world. Had he been honest enough to encounter the real problem he would have had to admit that what killed those children he claims to care so much about is the ideology that drives the Jihad against Israel. The real issue is the hate-soaked ideology that permeates Arab and Moslem culture. For some the Jihad is theological, for others secular-political, but in every case it leads to the same place.
Jihadi ideology holds that it is the duty of Arabs and Moslems to make war on Israel until Israel is eliminated. El Akkad does not mention that ideology. He pretends that it does not exist. He pretends that the Forever War of Arabs against the Jews and the tiny state of Israel is somehow Israel’s fault.
El Akkad does not have the integrity to admit that the little girls he continually claims are dying would still be alive, and perhaps prospering like his own child in the U.S. if the Arabs gave up the Jihad against Israel. All the Arabs would have to do to prevent so many deaths would be to leave Israel alone. El Akkad, like most of his fellow anti-Israel ideologues does not even consider that possibility. He cannot tell the simple truth.
Here is El Akkad’s real failing: he must trot out the bloody corpses of dead children, real or imagined, to lambast Israel. But if he admits that those deaths would not occur if Arab ideology changed and Israel was allowed to live in peace, then he has to look in the mirror at the culture in which he was raised and at his own malicious attitude towards Jews and Israel. He is hiding his malice behind those corpses.
If he is really concerned about dead children he has to condemn those who enable the Arab Forever War against Israel.
If he looks at the real cause of the war and its associated deaths he has to admit that the Jihadis and the Jihad enablers and allies are at fault. They wanted war. They caused those deaths.
El Akkad can’t condemn the Jihadis and their enablers and allies because then he would have to do something he is incapable of doing. He would have to take responsibility. He would have to tell the truth.
He would have to condemn himself.
Dr. Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.