Yes, that’s a term I made up: an apparent oxymoron, but more readily understood once you’ve read today’s quotes.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning, Egyptian-Canadian-American author and journalist currently living in the United States. He has covered the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring in Egypt, Black Lives Matter, and other devastating, world-altering events. His novels are influenced by his experiences, and his 2025 non-fiction “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” is about the war in Gaza.

On October 25, 2023, after three weeks of covering Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, El Akkad tweeted this message, which has now been viewed more than ten million times:

“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.”

Posthumous foresight.

And then he wrote his non-fiction book about that experience, which included these passages:

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say ‘these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day.’ to repeat the famous phrase about ‘who they came for first’ and ‘who they’ll come for next.’ But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted upon them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. and anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

“No, there is no terrible thing happening coming for you in some distant future. But know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead, if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.”

– Omar El Akkad, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”

And that applies, not only to Gaza, but to the rest of the world as well.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
1/23/26