Omar Al Akkad - Journalism, War, Stories Beyond America (2019), One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This (2025)

Adam Davis: Good evening.

Omar El Akkad: Good evening.

Adam Davis: Hey, that's great. Happy spring. Thanks for coming on the first night of spring, or the first day of spring, to the 3rd installment of Oregon Humanities 2018-19 Think and Drink series.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you for being here.

Adam Davis: My name is Adam Davis, and on behalf of Oregon Humanities, I guess I just want to say a big welcome to you, and I hope you will join me before we do anything else in saying a big welcome to Omar El Akkad and Emily Harris. So, the overarching theme of the series this year is journalism, justice, and democracy. And we're really excited that Omar and Emily will be talking about the work they've been doing and some of the questions that that work raises. I want to give you a sense of the shape of the evening, thank a couple folks. Ask you a couple questions to help Omar and Emily get oriented to the room, and then get out of the way. So, the thanks, I guess, before anything else— well, let me give you the shape again. These guys will talk for about an hour. We'll invite questions from you for about half an hour at this microphone over here. And then Omar will be signing books at what is now an inconspicuous table back there, but will become more visible as we go.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Adam Davis: And we're going to encourage you, when the formal program ends, to stay and eat food that's in the back and drink if you so desire, but to keep talking and to talk with either people you came with or people you don't yet know. And we're going to throw out a question that will hopefully make that easier to do. So that's the basic shape of the night. I want to say a big thanks to the Oregon Cultural Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Those 2 organizations make this and many other events around the state possible. Tonkin Torp, and especially Jeff Kron, Stoll Reeves, especially Emily Carr, Northwest Natural, especially Adolf Evans, the Kinsman Foundation. I want to say big thanks to all 4 of those organizations and people for helping get this going. And then we had 2 media sponsors for this. One is Bridgeline, which you'll hear more about. They helped get the word out about this, and they also make it possible for—

Omar El Akkad: Thank you.

Adam Davis: you to text or tweet questions towards us, and they'll do some follow-up conversation, too, over the next several days. And X-Ray FM, which also helped get the word out and which will be broadcasting an edited version of this before too long, often represented by Kieran Bond sitting somewhere over there. So, I don't know if that's happening. And I want to say also a thanks to the University of Oregon's Agora Center for Journalism.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you.

Adam Davis: And then a big thanks to many of you who support Oregon Humanities and the work we're doing around the state. And we really appreciate that. And it makes a lot of this work possible. So just a big thanks. 3 short questions before turning things over to Omar and Emily to help them get a sense of what's going on in here. The first is, if this is your first Oregon Humanities Think and Drink, could you make a little noise?

Emily Harris: Woo!

Adam Davis: And it— well, I just want to comment on how people seemed to know to say woo while they were clapping, which was surprising and a good surprise. If this is— if you've come to a Think and Drink before, could you make a little noise?

Omar El Akkad: Woo! All right.

Adam Davis: Pretty close. Great. These questions will get harder in order. The next question: If you've ever wondered what it's like to report on people in tense and difficult situations, could you make a little noise?

Omar El Akkad: Yes!

Adam Davis: Last question, again a noise-based question: If you've ever heard or read a story about someone in another part of the world And thought, that's my story, could you make a little noise?

Omar El Akkad: Great.

Adam Davis: So some of the challenges around that are built in and will probably come out in the conversation. Omar El Akkad has reported on and from lots of interesting places around the world— Egypt, Ferguson. We could go on, and you will hear more. He's also written a beautiful novel called American War, beautiful and provocative novel. And Emily Harris has also reported from many places around the world, including Berlin and Jerusalem, and helped start Think Out Loud here in Oregon not too long ago. We're delighted you're here and look forward to your conversation. Thanks.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you.

Emily Harris: Great. I want to thank you, Adam, and Oregon Humanities, and all of you for being here tonight. And thank you. I've been really looking forward to this for many months. Had the pleasure of learning a little bit about your bio and also reading your book. But we're not going to talk about the book tonight. I would say you should all read it, but it's not a book review. It's more to talk about the Middle East and reporting.

Omar El Akkad: I'm here exclusively to sell my book. Any question you ask me—

Emily Harris: Don't say that yet. That's for the end. When Adam and Kathleen and other people at Oregon Humanities asked me to do that, this conversation with Omar, part of the reason was because I've also reported from the Middle East. And while I really want to hear about Omar's experiences tonight, I thought we might start by just kind of laying the groundwork a little bit, like what— where we started from as far as connection to the Middle East. And Omar was born there, so he's got a good start. I wanted to ask you, obviously all of your early memories are somewhere from the Middle East because you were born in Cairo, you grew up in Qatar, which I'm probably mispronouncing because pretty much every American mispronounces it one way or another. But are there any strong childhood memories that you have that you now as an adult and someone who's gone back there as a journalist really associate as Middle Eastern memories, feelings, images, something evocative that reminds you of that place?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Emily Harris: That vast and diverse place.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you for doing this, by the way. Yeah, you're welcome. I appreciate it. And thank you all for coming out to this. I did an event a couple of weeks ago that was the day after what people in this part of the world call a snowstorm, what people in Toronto, where I came from, would call the start of spring. And the organizer— kept apologizing for the size of the crowd, saying, you know, the weather was bad, the weather was bad. And then earlier in the green room, the organizer of this event was apologizing, saying the weather was good. I think there's a window of like 60 to 62 degrees and overcast that's perfect. Otherwise, you're in trouble. So thank you for coming out on such a nice day. I was born in Egypt, and I lived there for the first 5 years of my life. My blood's from Egypt. My family, my parents, dating relatives, all from Egypt. But I left when I was 5. One of the earliest memories I have just as a child was of going to— what was it called? Le Frère. It was a French kindergarten in Cairo. And I hated it. I had no idea why I was going to a French kindergarten. I had no idea French at all. Did you know why you were going to kindergarten? Well, it was just— it's one of those things where the switch turns off in your head, and it's the first sort of memory. It just happens to be that. And I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why. I didn't understand the French. I had no interest in the language. And it occurred to me years later that this was such a prestigious thing. My parents were so proud of this.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: Because these are the winners. You look back to a lot of the history of the Middle East, and you look at the colonial history of the Middle East, and there's a reason why you can get by speaking French in Lebanon. And there's a reason why I speak English as well as I do. It's because it's considered the culture of the people who colonized the place. And so for a long time, it was this thing that stuck into my head of Why? Why are we doing this? And it's sort of the answer to that question built up over the years. One of the earliest memories I have has to do with— we were in the airport. So in the '80s, much like today, not much has changed. The economy in Egypt was terrible. Political repression was very high. My father couldn't find work. And so he ends up looking elsewhere. And he ends up with a job offer in Libya, of all places. So this is the mid-'80s. He's been offered a fairly good job in Libya. And we're in the airport. And the way Arabic names work is my name is my first name, and then my father's name, and then his father's name, and then our last name. So my full name is Omar Mohamed Ahmed Suleiman El-Aaed, which means my father's name is Mohamed Ahmed El-Aaed. Well, Mohamed Ahmed is probably the most common combination of names in the world. So it just so happens somebody is on a watch list with that name. Hmm. We get taken into secondary. We miss our flight. We end up not going to Libya. A couple of months later, he gets a job offer in Qatar. We end up in what will become the richest country on Earth. And the coin flip nature of what happened that day sticks in my head because we have, especially in this relatively privileged part of the world, this notion of the future being this thing that we're facing and we can shape it and we're moving towards it with a sense of purpose.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: And the reason I'm here is because of a coin flip at an airport in Cairo 30 years ago. I think about that a lot because I feel like a lot of what you need to know to understand the Middle East boils down to stuff like that. What about you? What's your earliest memory of the Middle East? Probably not kindergarten, I'd imagine, but—

Emily Harris: Okay, well, I was thinking about that, actually. And first, my earliest My first memory of the Middle East would have been when I went there when I was 17 on an exchange— it wasn't really an exchange. It was my propensity for free trips. Anytime I can get a free trip, I totally raise my hand.

Adel Iskandar: Right.

Emily Harris: So there was an announcement that came over the loudspeaker at school— I went to Lincoln High School here— one morning, and it said, if anyone's interested in a free trip to Jordan, you know, go to the principal's office after school. I was like, yeah, I'm not sure where Jordan is, but a free trip sounds pretty good. So, it turned out the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations was trying to bring kids to Middle Eastern countries of— children of Arabic descent.

Omar El Akkad: Mm-hmm.

Emily Harris: I'm not of Arabic descent, but they had targeted certain cities. And I think they were having trouble finding people of Arabic descent. This was in the mid-'80s. So, there was somebody from Logan, Utah, Portland, Oregon, one young woman from Flint. Michigan was Arab American. But we all went to Jordan for 5 weeks, studied Arabic, lived with families. I have a lot of memories from that trip, eating lamb's brains, throwing up in my—

Omar El Akkad: In the airport in Portland, or when you actually got there? They didn't—

Emily Harris: I think they have them now, like probably on a tour.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, it's one of the food carts in the—

Emily Harris: Yeah, definitely, for sure. But then I was thinking about it more, and I thought, well, what are earlier memories of the Middle East? And I thought, OK, gas lines, which were probably before you were born, but when I first became aware of there was some other part of the world that controlled a resource that made us alternate days we could go to the gas station. And then I thought more, and I thought— I grew up going to the First Unitarian Church and was involved in the Christmas pageant. And I was thinking, that's my first experience with the Middle East, which—

Adam Davis: Yeah.

Emily Harris: I hadn't thought about being Middle Eastern at all until I lived very close to Bethlehem, where that all happened according to the Bible. So lots of different ways when I look at it, the Middle East has sort of penetrated through my life. But the one thing that I really took away from that summertime in Jordan was I quit wearing a watch. I was totally watch-bound before that. Oh, is that right? But then time changed so much that summer. We just— we'd gather and sit into the evening, into the cool, and time didn't matter at all. And I really— like, I actually met Queen Noor. She gave us— all of us on our little trip, we all got watches from her and never wore it again. Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: I mean, the unit of time in the Middle East is inshallah. Inshallah is Arabic for God willing. And you're just saying, I'll meet you at 7 o'clock. And someone says, inshallah. And then you're on your own after that. It might happen. It might not. I'm not sure.

Emily Harris: And inshallah took on a really different meaning for me when I was there reporting in wartime.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Emily Harris: Because you'd say, see you tomorrow, inshallah, like if you're in Gaza or something like that. And you'd be like, yes.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah. I mean, so your defining sort of political experience was the gas lines. Mine was I was born the year after Sadat was assassinated. So, in the history of Egypt, there's a real turning point mid-century when you have this thing called the Free Officers Movement. There's a coup. And from that point on, essentially, the leaders of Egypt, the presidents of Egypt, are from the military. They're military background. And one of these guys gets assassinated. And then the year later, I'm born. And I'm born into essentially martial law. Which technically existed for the majority of my lifetime. Technically, Egypt is under martial law. You're not supposed to be outside at night. Anyone who's been to Cairo knows that Cairo starts to work at night. I mean, it only exists at night, you know. But technically, there was a curfew for years. So my father was working at a hotel in Cairo and was walking home at night, gets stopped by these soldiers who tell him, you're not supposed to be out here. And he says, well, here, I have a permit, because he was working in the tourism industry. And the guy says, let me see your permit. And so he gives him the permit. The soldier tears it up and says, let me see your permit. And that was the sort of environment that you're in at that point. He got bailed out because his boss was down the street, and his boss knew somebody who knew somebody, which is how a lot of things work in the Middle East and everywhere else, if I'm being honest.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: So that was the environment that we grew up in, was this notion of there's certain things you never talk about, and there's certain things that are off limits in terms of your agency to change them. One of the defining things, once I moved to Qatar, and then I would come back every now and then, and sometimes I would come back ahead of the elections. And one of the sort of defining images of coming back to Cairo in the months before the elections is that there would be these giant billboards on the side of the road with these very sort of generously drawn portraits of the president congratulating him on winning the upcoming elections. And the biggest name on the billboard would be the name of the businessperson who paid for the billboard, because it was understood what this person was trying to do, was trying to curry favor. You know, it was a thing you did. But that was the political environment that I associated with Egypt for— 20 years.

Emily Harris: What's an example of something that you wouldn't talk about, was off-limits talking about?

Omar El Akkad: Well, the state controls everything, right? And the relationship between the state and the military is essentially 2 fully overlapping circles, which is to say not only are the political leaders coming from a military background, The military is responsible for a lot of the industries in Egypt. Those are military factories. And so, you owe your livelihood to the military, even if you're not in the military. I mean, there's a draft, and if I had ever had a younger sibling, I would have had to go do military service and all of that. But in addition, there's 2 things. There is the involvement of the military with respect to just the economy. Yeah. The economic life of the country. And then there's Israel. And there's this idea that the military is standing in between us and the central villain in all things Middle East. And so support for the military is not something that you can question, which is not a fully alien thing in this part of the world, right? This notion that you don't question the military. Yeah. But it was very intertwined into the fabric of society. Any criticism of anybody involved in a position of power was and still is off limits. And that's not an Egyptian thing. That's much of the Middle East. This notion that there's a very real and well-understood trade-off. You know, in a place like Qatar, for example, Qatar is pound for pound the richest place on Earth. You go there, you're going to make 10 times as much as whatever job you're doing here— schoolteacher, journalist, whatever. You're going to make 10 times as much there. It's going to be tax-free. You're going to have this incredibly easy life. The trade-off is you don't talk about the following things. Right. You don't criticize the government. You don't criticize the royal family, which is the government. And as long as you sort of adhere to these rules, The benefit is well understood. And that's a big part of the reason the system works, is that you know what you're getting in return for this. When that part of the equation starts to fall apart, then you start to see the unrest that builds into something like the Arab Spring. If you're going to enforce all of this on me, and also the price of bread is going to make it so that it's too expensive to buy, no, that's not working for me. Yeah.

Emily Harris: Did you feel like a foreigner growing up in Qatar?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, but everybody did. So Qatar is one of—

Emily Harris: It's mostly foreign labor, right?

Omar El Akkad: It's 90% non-Qatari.

Emily Harris: So being a foreigner wasn't a foreign thing. It was very— it was the experience.

Omar El Akkad: No, I mean, it was— my best friends were a Somali guy, an Italian-American guy, a Palestinian. Pakistani guy. I mean, you sort of grew up in this environment when it was understood that there was a boundary between you and the local population. So it's really hard to get Qatari citizenship because they're trying to protect the oil wealth. And if you don't get citizenship, you can't own a home, you can't own a business, you can't build any kind of roots. And so it was understood that it was this place where you showed up, you made a bit of money, you saved some money, and then you went somewhere else.

Adam Davis: Right.

Omar El Akkad: And that was the experience for 90% of the population. I had very few Qatari friends, and my experiences of going to a Qatari person's home or something like that were very limited.

Emily Harris: What was your first memory— you talked about political violence, really, the kind of setup that was there. But what was your first memory of war, which so much Middle East reporting revolves around, although there's a lot more that goes on in the Middle East?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, it was the first Gulf War. So we were in Qatar, and we had no idea if we'd get hit or not, because it's— I mean, Qatar was involved in the Gulf War in that they sent their one tank that the military owns. And, you know, like, it was a joke. But you didn't know. Nobody had any idea how long this conflict was going to go on for. So I have this memory of—

Adam Davis: Excuse me.

Omar El Akkad: My father bringing home duct tape, just reams and reams of duct tape, and us drawing these big Xs in duct tape on the windows, the idea being that if they shattered, they wouldn't shatter into a million pieces. His work brought— they paid for gas masks. There was this—

Emily Harris: Because the threat was chemical weapons—

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, exactly.

Emily Harris: —from Iraq.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah. So there was this sense that this might happen. And nobody trained us in how to put these things on. We just kind of had them. And the end result was that nothing happened to Qatar, I mean, at all. It was a strange war, because in hindsight, what it really marked was the beginning of a growing of distance between wars and a population's experience of war. Excuse me. And by this I mean, if you look at something— if you look at America, for example, and America's experience with its own wars, The depictions of these experiences, if you start at the very beginning, you have oral accounts, written accounts, pictures, and then you get to moving pictures. And then by the time you get to Vietnam, you have color footage, and you have this very visceral experience of what war looks like, which is a really important thing. If you're going to go fight a war, you should know what's happening. And then it takes— you think that trajectory is going to continue that way. And then at the first Gulf War, it changes. If you go back and look at footage on CNN of the first Gulf War, it's this green night vision stuff. It looks abstract. There's these occasional bursts of light. And that was the turning point. Now you look at footage from the war on terror, and it looks like something out of a video game. You know, at one point, there was this Egyptian newscast that was running this piece about— it was a propaganda piece. It was about American involvement, military involvement in Syria. And look at what they're doing to Syria. Here's some footage of their drone killings. And it was footage from a Call of Duty video game that they mistook for the real thing. This is— you can look this up. This is a thing that happened on Egyptian national television. That distance was— at the time, you didn't really think of it. It didn't come up as a concept. But that was one of the most dangerous things. about that conflict is it marked the beginning of this great distance between the countries that fight these wars and when you have the privilege not to be in the place where the wars are fought, the distance you have from them. That's a really dangerous thing, I think.

Emily Harris: I remember listening to that war. I was in Moscow just out of college and listening to it on the radio. There was such a buildup to it. And then the bombs actually started. I mean, that felt very distant. And it's really true, that turned it into something very— that whole television experience.

Omar El Akkad: What was the Russian reaction to the first Gulf War? Wasn't it—

Emily Harris: I can't remember. Russia was kind of falling apart on its own at that point. Yeah, that's right. So it was not involved in the Middle East in the same way it has been, for example, over the past 5 years in Syria.

Omar El Akkad: Mm-hmm.

Emily Harris: And so forth. But that sense of disconnect and distance, how did that play into your further reporting? Because when you first got into reporting, I know you had a small stint on the financial desk, and then you dove into this report on the Canadian terrorists. And you, from what I understand, This was the first reporting you'd done on anything like this. How did you go about learning enough to report out on international terrorism? How did you start?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, the story of my first week at the Globe and Mail. I love telling this story.

Emily Harris: This is when you were filling in for the person who was on family leave and—

Omar El Akkad: No, that was my first stint at the Globe and Mail, period. That was— they hired me on. as their bottom-of-the-barrel summer intern. They'd already hired their regular summer interns.

Emily Harris: They put him like in charge of the financial desk on week 1.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I had $5.76 in my bank account, and they put me in charge of investment advice. I was an investment reporter. You said something. Had decided to split the parental leave with his wife. They both— I think they both worked at The Globe. And so at the last minute, they had this— they needed an investment reporter for the summer. And so I show up, and Marty Say, the investment editor, comes over and he says, blah, blah, blah from Wells Fargo financial desk is saying that you should invest on high beta, which is really counterintuitive. I want you to write it up. And I just stare at him. I was like, I have so many follow-up questions. What do any of those words mean? So that was my summer. And then for reasons that I still can't I can't quite put my finger on. They hired me full-time at the end of that. And so I started full-time in the summer of 2006. And I start on a Monday. And on that Friday, we have the largest terrorism arrests in Canadian history. We have this thing called the Toronto 18 case, which was these 18 people, some of them 17-, 18-year-old kids, who had all these grand plans of blowing up Parliament Hill and beheading the prime minister. None of it came to fruition. They were being watched the entire time. And this was— so that Friday, the RCMP, which is our FBI in Canada, shows up and does a sweep and arrests all of them. And the following day, it's the biggest news story. It's the biggest news story in the world for about 2 weeks. It's the biggest news story in Canada for about a year. And so the New York Times is on it. Everybody's on it. And the Globe and Mail, which is the national paper of Canada, gets beat. The National Post, the Toronto Star, the 2 other major papers have full A1 coverage. They've been on it for a while. And the Globe and Mail has a one-paragraph item on A2, you know, arrests made or something. Yeah. It was so bad, you can actually look this up. The New York Times did a story—

Emily Harris: About how bad.

Omar El Akkad: —on how badly the Globe and Mail got beat, which includes a quote from my editor-in-chief saying, I don't know why we got beat so badly. It was just the worst. It's every editor's nightmare. Situation. And so the following— I think it was the Monday— the editor-in-chief calls. He has an all-hands-on-deck meeting, the entire editorial staff of the Globe and Mail, 300 people. And he's looking around the room. He's looking for anybody with experience with Islam. He's looking for anybody with experience with the Middle East, because that's where these kids' parents came from. He's looking for brown people, right? And in a newsroom of 300, he finds 2 of us. He finds me, and he finds Kamau, the theater critic. This is a 100% true story. So he calls us over, and he says, you two, you're going to go to the 2 mosques where these kids used to go. You're going to talk to people. You're going to do some street reporting. You're going to— all right. This is what I do for a living. Sure.

Emily Harris: Wait. Would you have raised your hand if the assignment had come around, like, who wants to be on this team?

Omar El Akkad: I had been an employee for less than a week. I was going to do anything they told me to. Like, I straight up did not care in the slightest.

Emily Harris: But did you want to do this?

Omar El Akkad: I wanted to do it not for the content, but because I knew that this was going to land you on A1 for the foreseeable future, which is a really sort of cold and calculating thing for a journalist to say. But you're nodding for a reason, right? Like, we know this. This is— like, every journalist has had an experience in the newsroom where Somebody comes along and says, like, you thought this terrible thing had happened, but actually it's way more terrible. And then 3 journalists are like, oh, great. And it's understood the thinking in their head of what's happening. It's cold, and it's really amoral, and it's ugly. But it's when you're in a newsroom, that's the sense, right, is this is going to land me on A1. So anyway, so he sends us out. So I go to one of the mosques. Kamau, the theater critic, goes to the other mosque. I come back. I'm filing. I'm writing my file. He comes back. He gives me his file. And it's 500 of the most beautiful words I've ever read on the acoustics in the room and the color of the velvet drapes, because he's the goddamn theater critic. He's a genius, too. He just happens to be brown, right? And he's a tremendous writer, actually went on to leave The Globe and write a book called Brown: My Experiences as a Brown Person in Canada.

Emily Harris: It's not about interior design.

Omar El Akkad: It is not. It's gorgeously written. But he was not a reporter. He just happened to be the other brown guy in the room. So long story short, I spent the next 2 years of my life on that story. I spent the next 2 years of my life trying to figure out how these kids who had the most benign, just suburban upbringing went from I'm trying to get a date to the prom to building detonator videos off of YouTube. How do you make that leap?

Emily Harris: And can I just ask, in that time period, how did you know what to do as far as— I mean, I know you're a trained reporter. You're a reporter to ask questions, find leads. But you're pretty new at this. This is a huge thing. Was there a time where you're like, I'm not sure how big this story is, or what— how do I connect all these dots here? Just this kind of logistics of that huge story. Did it— was it hard ever? Did it stump you?

Omar El Akkad: It's a really good question. I never didn't know how big the story was, because there were context clues all around me. There were times when the editor would come over and just say, do you have anything for me? We have a gap on A1. Nobody ever says that. Nobody at a major newsroom has a gap on A1. They know exactly what's going on the front page. But this was the kind of story it was, was this notion that for weeks, anything you got, even an incremental thing, would land you on the front page. So I knew it was a huge story. But I was making mistakes left, right, and center.

Emily Harris: What kind of mistakes would you make?

Omar El Akkad: The one that stands out— The first day of the court hearings, it's a zoo. It's the Brampton Courthouse, I believe. And the New York Times is there. CNN is there. There's TV trucks everywhere. It's massive. Right. And the suspects are showing up. Their lawyers— well, the suspects aren't showing up. They're in the courtroom. But the lawyers and the wives of the suspects are showing up. And some of them are wearing the niqab. And some of them are wearing a hijab, and some of them aren't wearing this stuff.

Emily Harris: Niqab is the one that covers your face?

Omar El Akkad: Niqab is if you see the all black, and it covers your face, and it covers your hair, and it sort of melts into a dress. The hijab is just the head covering. But universally in the Globe and Mail, they were referring to all of this stuff across the board as a burqa. So they would be, the wives of some dressed in burqa showed up to the court. And I would read it and I would think, this is not a burqa. This is not— also, I was 25 years old. I'd been an employee for about 2 weeks, and I was terrified of trying to correct anybody because this stuff was clearly being approved. And so this goes on for a while until Mark McKinnon, who at the time was the Middle East editor, the Middle East reporter for The Globe, sends an email to the entire staff saying, stop doing this. This is a factual error that you're doing. He had the guts to do it, and I didn't. And that always pissed me off. In and of itself, it's just a factual error. It's just bad journalism. But it speaks to something. Just bad journalism? Well, I mean, there's a lot of bad journalism.

Emily Harris: I know. I know. But still, it's a trust factor in the end.

Omar El Akkad: It is, absolutely. And it speaks to the idea that there shouldn't be a lot of bad journalism. There is, but there shouldn't. But beyond that, it also spoke to this notion, I guess a fun story about me and Kamau, the theater critic. But when you have people in your newsroom who have grown up in a certain environment, and then they go cover that environment, that's usually a good thing. When you have the opposite of that, then stuff like this starts happening. You get a lot of stuff like this. I was covering— there was those shooters in California. It was this couple. It was, I believe, San Bernardino, was it? Yeah. This was a couple of years back. I was still working. I was working as a US correspondent for The Globe at the time. And at one point, I guess the FBI finished scouring through their house and then gave it back to the landlord, who immediately opened it up to all the media.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: So everybody could just go in and take a look, which is great if you're a journalist. It's a really weird thing to do on the part of everybody else. But— and immediately, I'm watching a CNN reporter talk about how they have a prayer rug On the wall. I was like, that's not a prayer rug. That's something completely different. You just took a stab at it. You have no idea what this is. I can't blame you. I don't know where you're from. If you're from Omaha, I don't know anything about Omaha. If they sent me to cover Omaha, I'd probably make mistakes. But there's something to be said for this kind of coverage from a distance. I used to think that being— removed was a good thing because it allowed you to be objective and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's all great, but knowing the environment you're in and having some experience with it is really the only foolproof way to stop doing stuff like that.

Emily Harris: Yeah, I'm not even sure it's totally foolproof. But do you think in that particular instance, and then also later, you know, when you were reporting in Cairo, in Afghanistan, How were you reacted to as being someone who was a journalist and who could speak Arabic, who could have some familiarity, maybe, or could at least fake some familiarity better with some of the cultural expectations or whatever? How did that help you, or did it ever trip you up? Did you not fulfill people's ideas of who you should be, for example?

Omar El Akkad: I mean, it was an entirely different skill set that you're bringing to the situation. So, when I showed up in Afghanistan, we had this rotation. We had a guy named Graham Smith who was in Kandahar, and he would do 8 weeks on, 8 weeks off. And every time he did 8 weeks off, he would go to Dubai, just get drunk for 8 weeks straight, and somebody else would come in and do the 8 weeks that he was off. And so, I was on one of those rotations.

Emily Harris: Oh, wow.

Omar El Akkad: And I happen to have this sort of universal skin color where I fit in for everything from Portuguese to Mexican to Afghan. People don't really know what to make of me. And so when I showed up to Afghanistan, I had grown out my beard, and I would put on the shalwar kameez, and I would fit in, right? I don't speak Pashto, but Muslim greetings are pretty universal.

Emily Harris: Salaam alaykum.

Omar El Akkad: In large portions of this world, you walk into a room, you say, Assalamu alaikum. That gets you a good way there. So what I was intent on was making use of this, right? I mean, you have a lot of reporters who show up, and they're embedded with the military that they're covering, and they sit in the back of the LAV, the armored vehicle, and the door closes. And then the door opens, and they're somewhere else, and they're told where it is, and then the door closes, and they go somewhere else. And that's kind of the system. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to go into Kandahar proper, and I wanted to talk to people who don't have a public relations officer to speak on their behalf. Um, my experience was just radically different from the other journalists who had gone there. A few rotations before me, Our superstar columnist at the time, this woman named Christy Blatchford, showed up and just refused to wear the hijab anywhere she went. She just said, this is on principle, I'm going to— ended up causing a riot in Kandahar City. Someone saw her in the car with a fixer. And like, you know, you want to make that statement, you go ahead, whatever. But that fixer probably didn't deserve to almost get killed that day. You know, it was a very different experience depending on who was going there. Right. And one of the things I really wanted to do was focus on people whose boss can't pick up the phone and get my editor-in-chief if they want to say something. And so we went out— one of the stories that stuck with me for a long time, we went out with a UN polio vaccination team. One of the things that happens when you're on the losing end of a war is that time moves backwards. Diseases that have previously been eradicated come roaring back. And it was one of the most fascinating experiences of human life on the losing end of a war. So we're in the suburbs of Kandahar. And we're walking around. And there's no maps of this place. You can't pull out Google Maps and, oh, we're on this street or whatever. So they have these hand-drawn maps of roughly where they are. The polio vaccine, I'm told, only works up until the age of 5. After that, it's not effective. Well, nobody had—

Emily Harris: Like a 5-year-old child?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, yeah. So if the child is over the age of 5, it's considered ineffective. It's pointless. And so none of these kids that they're running into— there's just kids running around— none of them have birth certificates. None of them have IDs. Nobody has IDs. So what they would do— and you can try this right now— is they would find a kid, They would ask the kid to put their arm over their head like this. And if your fingers go over past your ear, they assume that you're older than 5 years old, and they don't bother giving you the vaccine. And if it doesn't, then they assume you're younger.

Emily Harris: And why did this strike you so much? Why did this particular story stick with you so much?

Omar El Akkad: Because I came from a part of the world where you don't have to think about any of that stuff. You know, there's this sense that— one of the things that most frustrates me about the dynamic and the overarching dynamic, not just of covering this war, but of covering the world, is this propensity for people on the relatively privileged side of the world to impose exotic motivations on people on the other side of the planet.

Emily Harris: Exotic motivations. What do you mean?

Omar El Akkad: So the story I always— this is the one time I'm going to pitch my book, I promise, just because this relates to this. I wrote American War. And one of the things you're always asked is, why? Why did you write this novel? And I always go back to this one story of this recollection I have from many years ago of watching an interview. It was either on CNN or one of the other news networks. CNN. And it was an interview with a foreign affairs expert, a talking head, one of these people they bring in to periodically explain the world. And it was taking place in the immediate aftermath of a set of protests in Afghanistan. Local villagers were protesting against the US military presence. And the question that was put to this gentleman was something like, why do they hate us so much? Hmm. And as part of his answer, he noted that sometimes the special forces have to go into these villages and conduct nighttime raids looking for insurgents, and that when they do this, they will sometimes ransack the houses or hold the women and children at gunpoint. And then he helpfully added, and you know, in Afghan culture, that sort of thing is considered very offensive. I thought, you know, name me one culture on Earth that wouldn't consider this sort of thing offensive. And once you start to see that stuff, it's really hard to unsee. A few years later, I was watching this other think tank guy make the argument that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an end. I have no idea what that means. I can't— I'm sure it means something. But as part of his argument, he said, well, you know, in the Arabic language, they have different words for nation and state. What an exotic foreign language that has different words for nation and state. I wonder if there's any other language that has different words for nation and state. That has been one of my driving frustrations in life, is this notion of how easy it is to say, oh, those people, they're doing this weird, fundamentally weird thing. And so when you cover stories like that UN polio vaccination drive, you just say, well, OK, if you want to believe that, fine. But here's the conditions on the ground. You should at least understand that this is how things— nobody had GPS here. Nobody could just go to the central records office and find out what's going on. Imagine if you were under these conditions, and would you behave any differently? And that's sort of one of the central questions of all of this reporting is, imagine yourself in this position. What would you do? Thank you.

Emily Harris: I was living in Russia when the Soviet Union really did collapse. And it was fascinating to— it sounds horrible, but to watch the society try to figure out what to do, people what to do, when everything that they knew and understood, they were either finding out was untrue or it was failing them in some way that they'd really relied on. I mean, as simple as one thing that I remember so well is a—

Adam Davis: A woman.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Emily Harris: A woman saying to me at one point, summer camp, I don't even know, is there going to be summer camp this year? But when I was in Iraq covering the Second Gulf War, the same kind of feeling came over me again, watching people trying to strive for as much normalcy as they could. Can they send their kids to school today, or is it too dangerous? What can they recover from their house that might be able to be useful now that their house is gone?

Omar El Akkad: Where were you based at the time?

Emily Harris: Or where were you covering from? I would go in and out of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. And always— well, not always through Baghdad. Sometimes we'd drive or fly into Baghdad from Jordan. Sometimes we'd drive You know, from Kurdistan down.

Omar El Akkad: Mm-hmm.

Emily Harris: And I never went further south than— well, not to Basra. I was maybe a couple hours south of Baghdad and all the way up in different places at different times. But what struck me was how similar these feelings were between the Soviet Union collapsing, just in the way people would react. To society falling apart around them. They're really different situations, but then in Baghdad with this military war going on. And now I'm going to plug your book. What struck me about the novel that you wrote was since it's set in America, and I saw all these same behaviors as I saw, and I assume you saw, in times where people are Are just crushed in what their options are. And one of the things that struck me in that book was, yeah, of course, sure, the conditions just need to be right, and it will happen here. You can assign whatever exotic motivations. Before we leave reporting from the Middle East, because we're going to run out of time here, but I wanted to ask if you were ever, despite the in that That you might have had with some Arabic in Afghanistan, some Islamic greetings, more when you were back in Cairo, whatever color of your skin as you define it.

Omar El Akkad: But would you just elaborate on this?

Emily Harris: Neutral color depending on the season.

Omar El Akkad: But it's fine. No, go ahead.

Emily Harris: What did you say? Neutral color depending on the season?

Omar El Akkad: I used to be a lot darker than this. And then I made the mistake of moving to the Pacific Northwest. I haven't seen the sun for like 6 years.

Emily Harris: She's got to get out there for a week. Were you ever mistaken for some— like a spy or someone on the wrong side because you had moved away? Anything like that? Did anything— did you get called out in a cultural sense in any way?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, in a couple of fairly weird ways. One time I wasn't even reporting, and we just happened to be coming back from— I forget where. We just decided, my cousins and I, to drive out into the desert, which is a thing you do in Egypt if you're bored. You just drive out to the desert.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: It's gorgeous. And on our way back, we hit one of those impromptu military checkpoints. And we're coming back, and the guy says, you know, Where are you from? And my cousin says, you know, what's the better— Midtown. And he says, oh, you're Egyptian? And he's like, yeah, of course we're Egyptian. You can hear my accent. He says, no, you're not Egyptians. You're Israelis.

Adam Davis: Oh.

Omar El Akkad: You're Israeli spies. And if you ever get caught in this situation, all my cousin had to do, literally all he had to do, was say, my uncle is a high court judge. And the guy immediately backed off, said, go ahead, sir. Didn't— because are you going to take that risk? You're a random private in the middle of the desert. Some guy says, you know, like you both know, he was bored. That's why he said the whole Israeli thing was— he just— you're sitting there at 3:00 in the morning. What are you going to do? Let's have some fun with these kids. But are you really going to take the chance? I mean, my cousin's uncle actually happens to be a High Court judge, so that dude would have been in trouble. But I mean, that's the way things work is kind of— one of the things that I had a lot as a journalist is— so I left Egypt when I was 5. I started learning English essentially when I was 5, 6 years old. I sound like this. My Arabic is pretty bad, but my Egyptian accent, if there are any Arabs in the room, if I started speaking, 3 words in, they'd be like, oh, he's Egyptian. It's a really strong accent. It's like— I'm from Egypt. South Boston or something. Like, you hear it and you're like, oh, this person is from this place. And so I would have this surreal experience when I would go interview people, for example, or even when I would come in through the airport and they would see my Canadian passport, because as soon as you get a Canadian passport, you stop using the Egyptian passport. Like, it's just— life is just a lot easier.

Emily Harris: Some Americans may feel that way, too.

Omar El Akkad: I'm sure they will. I hold on to that thing. Besides universal healthcare. Yeah, my Canadian passport is— a lot of perks. And they would see it, and then they would open it up, and they would see my name, and they'd be like, what the hell are you doing? Like, clearly you're Egyptian. And I would say in Arabic, in flawless Egyptian-accented Arabic, I'm sorry, I don't speak Arabic that well. I left Egypt a long time ago. Just literally like if I came up on this stage and said, sorry, everybody, my English isn't I'm not that great, so just bear with me here and we'll get through it. And they would be like, what are you, like, you playing with me? And so I got into secondary a couple of times because of that. Because I'm one of those people who doesn't have a good answer to the question, where are you from? Like, I was born one place, I grew up in another, I'm a citizen of a third country, now I live in a fourth country. So I don't have a clean-cut answer to that question. And that got me in trouble a couple of times. But at the end of the day, man, they know you're Egyptian. They just know it. And for all the problems I have with that country, its people are incredibly hospitable. And when push comes to shove, if there's a fellow Egyptian that's in trouble, you're going to stand up for him. So it never went beyond just curiosity. That was it. I got lucky, basically.

Emily Harris: I had one guy in Iraq, some cleric, tell me— I know you work for the CIA. And it's good because I want them to hear this message.

Omar El Akkad: Huh. That's such a glass half full kind of way to look at it. I love that.

Emily Harris: I just kept my microphone out there, right?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, just speak into the flower if you can. That's great.

Emily Harris: Exactly. So when you came to the US as a reporter, you're a foreign correspondent in the US, so you're looking at it through those eyes. What did you see? What did you find compelling to cover here? And you came, you went— I know you covered Ferguson, but I don't remember where that is in your trajectory in the US. Was that one of the earliest stories that you covered, or was that later on after you'd been here for a while?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I landed in Ferguson the night they decided not to indict the guy who killed Mike Brown. And so I landed that night. The thing I say is, I've been a journalist for 10 years. I was a journalist for 10 years. I got teargassed twice. I got teargassed covering the Arab Spring in Cairo, and I got teargassed that night in Ferguson. And that's not to say that being in one of those places somehow gives you a heightened understanding of the other, but there were echoes. The visual language was very similar. The very militarized police presence, people who are so fed up of being on the receiving end of injustice that they were willing to stand up to that militarization.

Adam Davis: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: This ridiculous equation of the destruction of lives and the destruction of property, as though those were two equal and offsetting things. All of that echoed in my head. One of the really strange things about covering the United States for a foreign audience is— so in journalism, we have this thing called M-copy. And M-copy is just the—

Emily Harris: Not in radio.

Omar El Akkad: Not in radio? This is a print thing? I don't know what that is. I never knew. Yeah, I never knew. Maybe it might be a Canadian thing. For all I know, I just use it all the time. M-copy is the background stuff. So when you're waiting for the Supreme Court decision on X to come out, you write a bunch of background copy. The first instance of X was blah, blah, blah, and you know, that sort of thing, so that you can file the story as quickly as possible. M-copy for American stories for a Canadian audience was always really weird because it would always be— it would always boil down to something like, No, this is really how it works here. All my healthcare stories had 6 paragraphs of copy that boiled down to, nope, that's how it works here. I did a lot of healthcare stories because it was around that time when there was a lot of challenges to Obamacare and that kind of thing. I did a lot of climate change stories, and I did a lot of stories about mass shootings, and particularly mass shootings and healthcare. You would just have to explain that, yeah, this is the debate. This really is the window of debate. It's not between getting rid of these guns and not getting rid of these guns. It's not between having, by a wide margin, the highest number of gun deaths in the developed world and not having that. It's about the Obama administration trying to ban one kind of armor-piercing bullet and failing because they had too much resistance. Like, that's the window you need to frame yourself in to understand this debate. And that was a really surreal thing because there's tons of stuff that I talk about in terms of just being perpetually astounded that I think a lot of people in this room, if you grew up in this country, maybe you're not astounded by that. But for me, I mean, I grew up on American culture in the Middle East, and I thought I understood this country, and then I came here.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: And every day I'm reminded that I do not understand this country in the slightest. And that was the perspective I was bringing to my journalism about it. It was just, yeah, this is how it works here.

Emily Harris: Why did you decide to turn to fiction, quit journalism?

Omar El Akkad: Fiction's always been my first home. It's always been the place where I felt most comfortable. Then why did you get into journalism? What's the technical term? I need to put food on the table.

Adam Davis: Money.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Adam Davis: Still a bad choice.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, that was one of the central things. I also grew up in a part of the world, like Qatar especially— I think a lot of immigrants will relate to this. There's a societal notion that you don't grow up to be a writer or a painter. You grow up to be a lawyer or an engineer, that sort of thing. And I had that in my head. I hadn't shaken it off by the time I got to college. And so my degree is in computer science. I can't program my way out of a paper bag. I never went to class. It was a terrible decision.

Emily Harris: But you never went to class?

Omar El Akkad: Sorry?

Emily Harris: You never went to class?

Omar El Akkad: I went to the very first class, which was CISC 100. It wasn't even CISC 101. It was CISC for people who weren't smart enough to do CISC 101, computer and information science or whatever. And they had us do this thing where we tried to program a robot out of a maze. So if this, turn left. If this— And I spent 4 hours working on it, and then I hit run, and the robot went in circles and crashed into a wall. And I was like, this isn't for me. And that was the last— the first and last class I went to. But then I found the student newspaper, and that's where I got my education, was a solid 4 years of just working at the student paper. And I was lucky enough when I got out to get a— have a portfolio and be able to end up at the Globe and Mail, where I spent 10 years. But the whole time I was writing fiction. I wrote 3 novels before American War. None of them were any good, so I never showed them to anybody or tried to get them published. And American War was also sitting on my hard drive with the other 3 until I had a bad day at work. I had a day where I felt like I was just rewriting press releases.

Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: And I remember I hung up the phone with my managing editor, and I said, to hell with this. And I emailed a literary editor in Toronto who I'd met randomly 8 years earlier. And I said something to the effect of, I know it's every literary agent's worst nightmare when a journalist says, I have a novel for you, but I have a novel for you. Could you take a look? And she agreed. And 3 months later, we'd sold it to Knopf. And I got very lucky. I got incredible— somebody was having a good day when they picked up the manuscript.

Emily Harris: Well, it's a good book. I mean, I know you're being modest, but it's compelling. I must say, I think you told me—

Omar El Akkad: Thank you, by the way. That's very kind.

Emily Harris: You told me you hate it when we spoke before.

Omar El Akkad: I just can't assess it. I can't— this is a dumb analogy, but I mean, I'm sitting down planting seeds, and I can't map out the forest. You're in this world, and something comes out of it. But I can't assess whether it's a good or bad book. I knew that what separated it from the other 3 was that it felt a little more necessary to write. What do you mean? Well, the other 3, I really wanted to be a writer. This one, I had something I needed to say, something about the nature of revenge and this idea that there's no such thing as an exotic form of suffering. These felt like things that if I was given a megaphone and the world's ear, that I would say some of the things that are in this book, which helped me get over that hump of actually showing it to somebody or trying to put it out in the world. That was the big difference.

Emily Harris: Did you ever feel that about your reporting?

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, when it was good. Yeah, when it was something I was— I was one of those reporters, I was pretty good when I was invested, and I was really horrible when I wasn't.

Emily Harris: And what did it take to invest you in the story you were covering for— in a news fashion?

Omar El Akkad: I wanted to get to a place where I was telling stories that if I didn't tell them, you wouldn't hear them from anybody else.

Emily Harris: Right.

Omar El Akkad: So there was a long period in between some of the foreign stuff I did and then the U.S. stuff, where they had me do tech reporting. And tech reporting is a lot of fun because you get a lot of free stuff. And you get— at that point, tech companies had a ton of money. So we would get things like Research in Motion, which is now known as BlackBerry, at one point Canada's biggest tech company, had their annual buyer meeting where they try and schmooze with all the big buyers. They had it in Orlando, somewhere near Orlando. Orlando. And they rented out Universal Studios.

Adel Iskandar: Whoa.

Omar El Akkad: So we had the entirety— there were like 100 of us, and we had the entirety of Universal Studios to ourselves, which, if you forget that I'm a journalist and I have an actual job to do, was just a great day. It was just fun. Like, this weird dance hall act performed. They were really great. We went on the roller coaster over and over again because there were no lines. This is really silly stuff, right? I'm getting paid.

Emily Harris: It didn't feel necessary.

Omar El Akkad: No, it felt like nonsense, right? If I don't write about the newest iPad, are you really not going to hear about it from 800 other people?

Adam Davis: Right.

Omar El Akkad: It was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. And it got to that place. It got to that place where clearly I was being asked to do things that made sense in some kind of twisted financial way, you know, the top 10 things you need to know from the— here's a clickbait article for the thing. We need the clicks, you know, that sort of stuff. And I could have coasted on that for quite a long time. And I was making decent money. And the Globe and Mail in Canada is one of those things where you say— it's like saying I work for the New York Times. You know, like, in Canada, it's a thing.

Emily Harris: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: And there were lots of people who would have wanted that job, and I wasn't one of them. So I was keeping it— I was taking a job away from somebody who wanted to be that tech reporter, wanted to report on that iPad. And I was feeling fully unfulfilled. And I was feeling like I was rewriting press releases for people who don't need that help. All of it was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do with my life. And so as soon as I got this book deal, I thought, if you can't make the leap now under these conditions, you're never going to have the guts to do this. And so I did. It's been an okay decision so far. One of the weird things about being a fiction writer is that you just get random sums of money at random intervals, and you have no way to predict what the What the hell's going to happen? That's very different from every other Friday when I would get a paycheck. So getting used to that has been different. But I'm happy with my work more days than I'm not. And that means a lot.

Emily Harris: We're going to start— wait, wait, we're not done yet. We're going to start taking questions in just a couple— I have a couple more things I want to ask Omar. But before you guys get your But come on up to the mic if you have a question for Omar, and we'll start in on that in just 2 minutes. But you can start making your way there, if you don't mind. 2 things I wanted to ask you. I want to tell you I also hate your book because—

Omar El Akkad: All right. Let's do— sorry, wait. Do you hate my book? Who hates my book?

Emily Harris: No, I hate your book.

Omar El Akkad: You hate your book?

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: Okay. I get that a lot. Yeah.

Emily Harris: But what do people tell you they— why do they hate it?

Omar El Akkad: Well, I mean, it's a stone-cold bummer of a book.

Emily Harris: No, it's a—

Omar El Akkad: Super depressing. Not to spoil it, but true story, the Chinese translation, the Chinese publisher changed the title. They didn't like American War. The Chinese title literally translates to Nobody Survives. Spoiler alert, if you haven't read it yet.

Emily Harris: It's not true, though. Some people survive. But—

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, but Some People Survive doesn't have the same ring to it.

Emily Harris: No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It's a really good title. You should maybe re-release it. But I hate it because it seems like it could happen. The way you lay it out, it seems like it could happen. And I think ultimately what I'm responding to is what you were saying before is of— There aren't exotic forms of suffering. There aren't exotic forms of people being horribly cruel to each other. There aren't exotic forms of people seeing only their group. It's universal. Anyway, in the way you lay it out, I'm like, oh, because I was thinking of— wasn't before 9/11, wasn't there a guy who wrote a book about People flying planes into the Twin Towers. Because you remember this?

Omar El Akkad: I don't. The one thing I remember, though—

Emily Harris: So now I'm afraid that your book has become the predictor.

Omar El Akkad: There was literally an album that came out on that Tuesday. There was this rap album. It was this duo. And the picture on the album was them standing like this behind the Twin Towers on fire.

Emily Harris: Oh, geez.

Omar El Akkad: Which was just the worst timing in the history of popular culture. Nobody ever heard from that group again. That album is hard to find, but that's neither here nor there. That's just something I'm talking about.

Emily Harris: You sat with these ideas much longer than I did in just reading it. So how do you sit with all these ideas that you turned into fiction, but seem pretty plausible to me, of a really horrible, horrible future? How do you sit with that? How do you get up and write some more?

Omar El Akkad: I mean, the process of writing is difficult, but the process of having written is very cathartic. Because when you're on the other side of it, it's on the page. And in the case of this book, it's now out in the world. And so there's a letting go. And the process of doing it is very difficult. But once it's done, it's really— you feel lighter. There's a lot of my residual experiences covering places like Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay end up in this novel. They end up on a superficial level. They inform the scenery, the locations. Excuse me. But also on a deeper level of just witnessing people go through this immense cruelty and not be able to do anything about it, to have agency stripped from them. So all that stuff works its way into the book. One of the weird things about it is that I started writing the book in the summer of 2014. I finished the first draft summer of 2015. 3 weeks later, Donald Trump announces he's running for president. The book ends up coming out 4 months into the Trump administration. And suddenly this book I intended to be a work of allegory, not really about a literal second American Civil War, is suddenly taken as a very literal attempt at how a second civil war is going to go down. And it ends up showing up on all these lists of the first novels of the Trump era and the books you need to read to understand that. And that's been great for my royalty statement, and that's been great for book sales. But in terms of what I needed to do, what I was trying to do, to tell somebody else's story and superimpose it on the most powerful place on Earth, that's been largely obliterated. It's very much been taken as this notion of like, this is what our future could be. And by definition, I can't tell you if this is predicting anybody's future. I can tell you almost everything in the book is predicated on something that did already happen. It just happened to somebody who doesn't have much of a voice. Thank you.

Emily Harris: Do you think journalism or novels are better at telling the truth?

Omar El Akkad: I was asked this question before, and it led me down a really weird path. And I could not— I didn't come to a definitive conclusion. The closest thing I could come to was this notion that the things you absorb, I think, from nonfiction are much more straightforward. But the things you absorb from fiction, they stick. So my favorite work of nonfiction of all time, my favorite nonfiction book, and I think the best work of journalism I've ever read in my life, is a book called A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan, which is an account of America's misadventures in Vietnam. And for my money, also the best book written about Afghanistan and Iraq, because it covers the same kind of hubris and the same kind of motivating factors.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: I can't remember a single factoid from that book. It's my favorite work of journalism of all time. I can't tell you which village was bombed on which day. I will never, ever forget what Song of Solomon taught me about the power of names. That's stuck in a part of my brain, and it's never going away. And so I think they— one is the underside of the other. I don't think that a complete understanding of the world can rely on only one side of those things. Thank you. They just— one is concerned by definition with answers, and the other is concerned with questions. There's no answers in American War. There's no answers in any of the novels I've written. I have no obligation to provide answers in fiction. What I do when I go to fiction is explore questions that I specifically have no answers for. I need that space. I also need to know what the hell happened. And so, you know, that's where the other side of the coin comes into play.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: But they fulfill very different needs for me.

Emily Harris: Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you.

Emily Harris: There's more people who want to talk to you. Go ahead.

Omar El Akkad: Good evening. My name is Jon Sanford. I've read the book. I found it poignant and haunting. And you mentioned in another talk that I listened to that you needed to write The American War. You've mentioned it tonight as well. And have you fulfilled that need to talk about these things, or is there a next step? And I've got a second question. Also, in both of your guys' reporting, did you run into Marla Ruzicka? Do you know this name?

Emily Harris: Say it again.

Omar El Akkad: Marla Ruzicka. It was a book written by Jennifer Abramson called Sweet Relief. She was an aid worker. You guys were there at the same time. I just wonder if you guys crossed paths.

Emily Harris: So, again, 2-part question. Not familiar to me, but I'll look it up.

Omar El Akkad: No worries. Yeah, thanks. Thank you for that. I— a few months after American War came out, I was still— I couldn't get out of journalism mode. One of the things about working as a print journalist is it's a very, what have you done for me lately kind of job. You know, you go a few days without filing an article and you feel like a slacker. Whereas when I was working on the novel, I would meet with my editor and they would say, you know, we want a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that. Okay, see you in 6 months. You know, and it was a very different kind of mode and I hadn't gotten into it. And so I was feeling really worthless.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: Because it had been months since I published a book. I'd done nothing. I'd done bookstore appearances. And I was thinking about how to recreate the conditions under which I could work on a new manuscript. And I very quickly came to the conclusion that what I needed to do was be very angry. There are certain writers who I will read about anything. I'll read Toni Morrison about anything. I've gone back and read James Agee's movie criticism. I, you know, I'm not one of those writers. I don't have that caliber of talent. I need to write about something that feels necessary, and there's a direct overlap between what feels necessary and what makes me angry. And so when you talk about this idea of letting go, there was something really cathartic about putting American War out into the world, and subsequently something very frustrating about the way it was received. which was very different than the way I intended it. I've come to terms with that in the years that have passed since. But I'm in a place where I need to figure out how I'm going to write about this country, because the book that wasn't actually about this country is now believed to be a book about this country. And I need to figure that out. And also, When I want to ignore this country. I mean, one of the things about America is that it's a very loud place. And that lends to this notion that things that happen here are unique to here. They're not at all. They're just much louder here. And so with the work I've started since American War, thematically and in terms of motivation, there's a lot of similarity. But I need to figure out and be very deliberate about which roads I want to take that are fundamentally different. So it's a very roundabout and rambling answer to your question. I apologize for that. But that's the closest I can come to hitting that. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Emily Harris: Hi.

Omar El Akkad: My name is Dave Anderson. I have a question for you about U.S. politics, from an outsider's point of view, I suppose. And at the risk of treating you like a spokesman for the Muslim community, I'm curious about your take on Congresswoman Omar's comments about the influence of the Israeli lobby and the very complicated relationship that the U.S. has with Israel and what it means today to be anti-Semitic. Thank you for that question. You can sort of hear the murmur in the crowd, right? There's a kind of like real nervousness about where this is going to go. So, you know, a few days ago— just because I'm going to start at the beginning of your question, which is this notion of the extent to which I speak for the Muslim community, and obviously I don't. There's a billion of us. We can't agree on much. Yeah. A few days ago, I woke up and found out that some white supremacists went and killed 50 people in a mosque in New Zealand. And I'm not bringing that up to say, and that's why the following that I'm about to say is right. That's not my reason for bringing it up. My reason for bringing it up is because I thought about the number of systems and the number of really powerful people that immediately had to go into play to explain why this isn't who we are. Right? And some people did it really well. The Prime Minister of New Zealand did it really well and from a really honest place. And some people did it really badly, right? Some people who spent previous years inciting anti-Muslim hatred immediately came out and said, we abhor the terrible violence that happened in a place, and I'm going to be really vague about it because I don't want to speak in details because I secretly don't like these people. And one of the things I was thinking about is one of the most common ways of trying to explain why this very bad thing is bad. And I thought back to this moment of right around the time Trump was musing— this was during the election period— and Trump was musing about a number of really hateful things, but one of them was this notion of having Muslims carry special ID cards. And be subject to special kinds of profiling. And Hillary Clinton, who was his opponent at the time, comes out and says, this is a really terrible idea. Of course it's a terrible idea. Because the Muslim community is a really important ally in the fight against terrorism, and we don't want to alienate them. And I understood immediately why she framed it in those terms.

Adel Iskandar: Why?

Omar El Akkad: It's because she needed the support of a certain group of people who are very passively racist. And this is the pragmatic argument. Yeah, you might— okay, don't like these people, that's fine. But like, there's a self-interest here, right? And I think a lot about that argument because one of the central ways in which this sort of thing is framed is in that really popular method of, first they came for this group and I didn't say anything because I'm not a member of this group, and then they came for this group and I Which is a very well-meaning way to think of things, but in fact has a really dark negative space. This group of people have no value intrinsic of themselves as human beings except relative to that they might be the canary in your coal mine, right? And so I think a lot about that in terms of how I represent myself as a Muslim. I have no interest in converting anybody. My relationship with my religion is entirely personal. Thank you.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: This sentence I'm speaking right now is the most I've ever talked about it in public. And that's my right, you know. So that was a very roundabout way to just frame where I stand in terms of whether I speak for the Muslim community or not, or that sort of thing. In terms of— one of the things about growing up in the Middle East is that it is a hotbed of 2 things. It is a hotbed of Israeli state aggression against the Palestinian people. Palestinians, and it is a hotbed of rampant antisemitism. I grew up around both those conditions. And it is very, very easy to criticize the state of Israel and then wander into that place where you start to become clearly antisemitic. My experience with that— I'm not Jewish— the closest experience I have to that is With respect to something like the state of Saudi Arabia. The king of Saudi Arabia, his official title is the king of Saudi Arabia and the custodian of the 2 holy mosques. It's the state attaching itself to a religion because it insulates you from a lot of criticism. I happen to have no respect whatsoever for the sanctity of the nation-state. I grew up in a part of the world where a bunch of French and British guys drew some lines on a map, and now we have Lebanon. I'm Egyptian. If I was born a few years earlier, I would also be Syrian. For a while, they were the same country. And so I have no respect for the nation-state or the idea that the nation-state should ever be dealt with with kid gloves. And that certainly is true of my criticism of the state of Israel. But I'm also cognizant of the fact that I grew up in a part of the world where there is immense antisemitism. And if you can't criticize a state without wandering into that territory, you need to keep your mouth shut, because in the long run, that does an immense amount of damage. I don't think in any way that it is impossible to criticize a state like Israel without wandering into that territory. I don't believe that for a second. I also think that especially in this country, Most politicians don't give a damn about Israelis or Palestinians and would much rather the problem just go away. And in the meantime, they'll do whatever is politically expedient, and if that changes overnight, they will change their position. Other than a select group of people who have either a personal connection or this weird evangelical thing about bringing about the second coming or whatever that thing is, with the exception of those folks, I think most people who are in positions of power in this country would just rather that whole thing go away. That's a really dangerous place to be, because it makes you amoral, and a lot of people die in the meantime. Has there been immensely anti-Semitic criticism of Israel? Absolutely. Does that mean you can't criticize the state of Israel? Absolutely not. That's where I stand on it.

Emily Harris: Thank you. Hi. I guess first I feel like I should tell you, when I came upon your book and read it, I did come from that, you know, this is some sort of premonition about the fate of the United States kind of dialogue. But when I read it, I didn't take that away from it, and I think I did kind of understand and feel I feel your intention of just trying to encourage empathy from these people and what they're dealing with. That being said, I guess what I wanted to bring the conversation back to is kind of just what you guys were talking about very briefly about the burqas and the prayer rugs and things like that that were misunderstood.

Adel Iskandar: Yes.

Emily Harris: The more I try to learn about global affairs and global history, the more I see that and I feel that it's these subtle misunderstandings of entire peoples that really creates— it starts as a little minor mistake, but it kind of grows into something much larger than that, as far as misunderstanding.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you.

Emily Harris: conflicts and cultures and things. And I don't know, I just feel like that's definitely something that you have a lot of thoughts about. So I don't have a specific question, but maybe just, you know, what are your— you know, if you could expand on your feelings about that and maybe your thoughts about what we could do to, you know, ourselves, you know, be more sensitive to these things and encourage people to think about those little things that it's It's kind of hard to— and might seem irrelevant. That's kind of it. Thanks.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Emily Harris: Well, this actually reminds me of the first time I went to the Soviet Union, and I got really tired of being an American, because I either felt like I was sent from heaven or the devil incarnate. I mean, it was one or the other. And everyone there had a particular narrative about the U.S. And I was like, yes, that's true, and it's not at the same time. And yeah, it was just a lot imposed on a 16-year-old. But yeah, how do you respond?

Omar El Akkad: I have a good story about the flip side of that. When I was in Toronto, there was this mosque in Toronto, and it was a lot of people from different cultures, a lot of Canadian converts. And one of the things that happens in mosques like that is that there's a real yearning for the authentic Islam, you know, Islam from the old country, that sort of thing. And so one day, this mosque flies over a sheikh, an imam from Saudi Arabia. And they fly over this guy and they say— they tell the congregation, come out tonight, we're going to do a Q&A. This guy's from like the center of it. This guy knows what he's talking about.

Emily Harris: It's pure.

Omar El Akkad: Fly this guy over, right? So the guy comes over, and this Q&A session, and at one point somebody gets up and says, Sheikh, we have this real problem here with beer. Everywhere I go, these people, they all— all of their social functions revolve around beer. What do I do? And the Sheikh just looks at him and he's like, you drink the beer. Like, what's the problem? I don't understand. Just drink it. Yeah. The guy's like, I'm sorry, what? He's like, yeah, drink the beer. I don't care. Whatever. Next. You know? So the organizers are sitting there thinking like, what the hell? We brought this guy over from Saudi Arabia. He's telling people to drink beer. What's going on? And then afterwards, the event ends, and they're talking to the sheikh, and they're like, listen, that beer question, what— and they realize the guy has never left Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia only has nonalcoholic beer.

Emily Harris: Wow.

Omar El Akkad: He just assumed that's what it was the rest of the the world. And they're like, no, no, the beer here has alcohol. He's like, astaghfirullah. They bring everybody back. He has to explain the— it's not a unidirectional thing, right? It happens in almost every circumstance, no matter where you are. You know, my comments with respect to stuff like that are pretty straightforward. Make some space for somebody who Who doesn't have the privilege of getting out of that situation. And one of the things— I mean, I don't know if you feel this way, but a lot of my journalism was always in the back of my head, there was this notion that I'm a tourist here. I'd be in a war zone. Yeah, I could empathize, and I could do all of this stuff, and I could really feel for what's— at the end of the day, I get to leave. Right? I get to stop being whatever this is. Yeah. And one of the things you can do, one of the easiest things you can do when you're trying to get into this kind of situation and do something positive, make some space for somebody who can't get out of that situation. Right? And that goes across the board.

Emily Harris: What do you mean by that, make some space for somebody who can't get out of that situation? Are you talking about as a journalist or as a person who, in terms of her question, you know, So right now, in my opinion anyway, the most—

Omar El Akkad: the single most important story in this country is the essentially internment camps that are being built for migrants who come to this country and are described as illegals, even though it's not illegal to claim asylum. And so you see some coverage of this, right? And you can very quickly tell if the coverage is done by somebody who has a foothold in this community and somebody who's there as a tourist. And that doesn't mean that somebody who's there as a tourist— and I spent the vast majority of my life as a journalist as a tourist— doesn't mean that they can't, by definition, do a good job. It just means that when you're talking about an understanding, the stakes are higher for somebody who has a foothold in this community, who understands, who has an element of, this isn't part-time for me, right?

Emily Harris: This is beyond empathy.

Omar El Akkad: Well, I mean, you know, as of late, the idea of empathy gets a really bad rap. There's a bunch of my favorite novelists have written these articles about the uselessness of trying to engender empathy. And I don't know if I believe that, but they're much smarter than me. So I've been thinking it over a lot. But just the notion of this isn't— this is somebody's— this is the entirety of somebody's life experience. Right? When you're in— if you're in that situation, if you're in one of these camps, if you just walked God knows how long to get to the border and you're put in one of these camps, that's not a part-time thing for you, right? That's your life now, right?

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: And if somebody can come from a community that has folks who've experienced this or themselves might have experienced this, they bring to it an entirely different set of stakes, an entirely different set of understanding. than somebody who comes in and says, yeah, I empathize, and tomorrow I'm going back to DC because I have to do the White House press briefing. Right? So all I'm in support of is this notion of, if you are covering a community, have some sense of what your newsroom looks like relative to that community. And if they don't look the same, you can pretty well predict where those gaps are going to show up. Yeah. You can pretty well predict who's going to use the word burqa when they should have used hijab or something like that. And that goes for any system, right? Journalism is a really important system in any society. So is the government. So is criminal justice. And if those systems of power don't look like the communities over which they hold power, and journalism holds power over community, it tells you what to think about, if they don't look the same, if they don't resemble one another, you're going to have problems. They're going to start with little factual errors, but they're going to go much bigger than that. So that's where I stand on it.

Emily Harris: We just have like 5 more minutes.

Omar El Akkad: Oh, OK.

Emily Harris: I think we'll make it through everybody. My name is Chris. First of all, I have a daughter at UBC right now studying journalism. She's getting her master's, and she's enjoying the healthcare there. My question for you is— so, this is Journalism and Justice. And you are reporting on, as a journalist from Canada, things that are going on that are absolutely insane— our broken record of not doing anything about healthcare, our broken record about gun violence, our broken record about immigrants. Climate change, et cetera, et cetera. So whether it's issues of race or social class or religion or whatever, beyond what those differences are that are internal to the U.S., what are the other things that you think create problems, not only in terms of how we address these problems in the United States, but how they then create the bigger problems that we need to address globally, such as climate change. What are the ways that you— that we can supersede these problems? Because I'm tired of the broken records, and I'm wondering what you guys think. Like, I hear Al Ledsen all the time on the podcast Reveal, and again, I just I just wonder what's missing here. How do we make those changes?

Omar El Akkad: The short answer is not— is going to be somewhat disappointing. I have no idea. I went down to southern Florida one time to cover this story about climate change and what it's doing to that part of the world. And so I would go to these towns where the mayors are telling the residents that their grandkids are probably not going to be able to live here. It might end up being a shipping port or something like that, but planned to be elsewhere. And I was talking to this guy, this professor, Professor Wanlis, I believe his name was. He's a climate scientist, and he's been raising the alarm about climate change for 30-plus years. And what he'll do is he'll go into any community that'll have him, and he'll give a presentation about why you need to know about this and why it's particularly important if you live in Southern Florida.

Adel Iskandar: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: To know what would happen in the worst-case scenarios. And he told me every time he goes to one of these presentations, he brings with him this relief map of that location, whatever location he's in, with a bunch of overlays. And he'll say, this is what your community is going to look like with 1 meter of sea level rise, with 2 meters of sea level rise. And he said that inevitably, every single time at the end of the talk, Somebody would come up and say— they would point to a spot on the map and say, oh, my house is going to be OK. And he would say, yeah, you happen to live on a hill. Congratulations. You need a boat to get around. The infrastructure is gone. But he was getting at this notion that people have a real hard time thinking in terms of space outside their immediate surroundings and in terms of time— Excuse me.

Emily Harris: Excuse me.

Omar El Akkad: In terms of time outside the length of a mortgage, so about 30 years. And that's sort of exactly what climate change is. It's outside the confines of your immediate surroundings. And geologically, it's happening in the blink of an eye. But in terms of sort of human perception, who cares what happens 100 years from now? And for a long time, I was writing about climate change almost exclusively. It seemed to me one of those things that I needed to cover in this country. Because I had this notion of climate change as finally being this problem that superseded all of this other stuff, superseded race and class. And then it occurred to me, no, no, it doesn't supersede any of this stuff. It's going to be overlain on top of that. So when there were those forest fires in California, suddenly we started seeing these farmers start to look at Oregon as a place to move to. That's the privileged part of that migration. Folks in Bangladesh are not going to have that. It's not going to be nearly as orderly. They're not going to look on Zillow and find the next place they're going to go to. It's going to be overlaid on top of all of our existing problems. And so I don't know how you go about fixing that without starting at the underlying problems. And acknowledging them and working to fix that. I don't know how you do that. And nothing in my experience of America has led me to believe that there's a long track record of acknowledging these things and working to fix them. And again, I say that, and then people, you know, they think back to whatever touchstone in history is really relevant to them with respect to that. But that's not an American thing. That's an everybody thing. I always go back to the same thing for this place in particular, but for every place, which is you start by acknowledging the founding sins. You're in a country that was founded on 2 central sins, the extermination of a group of people and the enslavement of another group of people. One essentially allowed for the geographic expansion of the place, and the other allowed for the economic expansion.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: You start with that acknowledgment, and you start with acknowledging the consequences of that. Once you're in that place, I think solutions are much easier to come by. But you have to get to that place first. And right now in particular, just in terms of the political situation in that country, we feel like we're very far away. But these things happen in cycles, and so I'm optimistic for whatever comes on the other side of this. It's not a very satisfactory answer, but I'd be lying to you if I said, if we did this, this, and this, we'd be okay.

Emily Harris: I just have a brief thing to add, which is I've been really interested in what makes people change their minds about something. And it's a surprisingly sensitive topic. I find people don't want to admit that they change their minds very much.

Omar El Akkad: Mm-hmm.

Emily Harris: Which I find fascinating, because why wouldn't you? Like, if you look at our political system, you don't want to flip-flop, right? I went to a fantastic play called Friends with Guns a few weeks back, and we had a talkback like that afterwards, and I asked the audience if anybody had changed their minds on guns, and nope, nope, nope, not holding on to that. And I did a series from the Middle East about 2 Israelis and 2 Palestinians who not only changed their minds about something having to do with the conflict, but actually changed their actions in some way. And it was different directions. It wasn't sort of a universal from war to peace or from peace to war or anything like that. But it's very— it's almost personal. I don't know. It's just like a challenging to who you are in some way. So it's something that has to be approached with way too much psychology and assistance.

Adam Davis: Yeah.

Emily Harris: It's not a realm of just factual dealing at all, at all. We are pushing into things. But yeah, let's take these 2 last questions.

Omar El Akkad: Hi, I'm Tom. I want to thank you both for being here and coming. This is fantastic. I'm a product of 50-some-odd years of learning different things. But I grew up, and my notion of—

Adel Iskandar: What Persia was about, what the Middle East was about, was a paragraph in a chapter in my textbook. It was sad.

Omar El Akkad: I went ahead and did some later research and read a book called Destiny Denied. I forget who the author is, but it was an excellent treatise on what Islam is and how it came about and everything. And what I'm curious about, where I'm going with this, What could we learn more to allay some of that cultural insensitivity that came from my roots, if you will?

Adel Iskandar: How could we go about becoming less insensitive about it? How do we learn more without necessarily, you know, I'm not going to pick up the Quran and read it necessarily, but what could we—

Omar El Akkad: how might we go about learning more?

Adel Iskandar: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: That's a really fascinating question. Thank you for that. Let's say you're on the flip side of it. You were exporting a book about America to students in the Middle East. What would be in your introduction? What would be your central chapters? What would you focus on first? I'm not sure what I would say.

Adel Iskandar: I mean, there's the notion of our Constitution and But there's this whole rich history of all of the immigrants coming to America and what it created for us and things like that.

Omar El Akkad: So, but then, I'm also not paying attention to the people who were indigenous here when they first showed up. So, you know, I wouldn't know where to start, I guess, is what I'd tell you.

Emily Harris: It might be something like, it's complicated. Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I mean, the reason I ask is because I'm in a similar place, which is to say that the first thing I would have to do is come up with definitions. Am I writing about Muslim identity? Am I writing about Arab identity? Am I writing about the places where those intersect? If I'm writing about Muslim identity, I have very little knowledge of Indonesia. I've never been, but that's an incredibly populous Muslim country. And so, it would be almost impossible for me to create a hierarchy of what constitutes this identity or that identity. And that's not me trying to duck the question that you're asking.

Adel Iskandar: No.

Omar El Akkad: What I'm trying to get at, which is more important to me, is what framework you're coming from trying to understand this, because there are ways that I can frame America that would lead to very different understandings of America, and none of them would be untruthful.

Emily Harris: This is like the Soviet Union when I was there. This is true. It's pure and perfect, or it's hell on earth.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah. And I mean, this is— what's her name? Alexievich. Oh my God. The Nobel laureate who does the oral histories did one of the Soviet Union, of the breakup, the years of breakup of the Soviet Union. And it read like people in parallel universes. You know, you'd get one oral history that would describe this dystopia when people are starving to death, and another one where this guy has a warehouse full of tracksuits that he's selling at an 800% markup. And everything's great, and he has a fancy car. And it was just entirely different worlds. And that's what I struggle to get at, is this notion of what am I going to explain to you? I mean, if I'm explaining a personal history of Egypt, I'm going to start with the food. You know, that's who I am. That's what I was brought up on. I think what was— what's important to me is this notion that I, as quickly as possible, eliminate the exotic. There's a really famous story of Edward Said trying to get the work of Naguib Mahfouz translated into English. Naguib Mahfouz is maybe the most famous Arab writer, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize. And he's going around, Edward Said is going around, and he's trying to get publishing houses, you know, if you're going to translate one person from the Arab world, translate this guy, you know. And at one point he's rejected, and the publisher says, You know, we'd love to, but Arabic is a really controversial language. It's a fascinating statement, right? You can unpack that for days. Arabic is a really controversial language. I would try to demolish that. That's what I'm trying to get at. Once I can get to that place of explaining, for example, that the singular slogan of the Arab Spring in Egypt was, I think freedom, social justice, bread. And people say, well, bread? What the hell? It was about the price of food. The price of food was going up. People couldn't afford to live. That's such a universally human thing. And if I can convince you that you in the same position would be out there yelling freedom, social justice, bread, I can do the rest in whatever order I want. What I need to get to in the first place is to convince one group of human beings that another group of human beings are in fact human beings. Once I can do that, everything else will take care of itself.

Adel Iskandar: Thank you so much, Jorge. Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for being here. I want to start off by saying that it is very difficult to be undertaking this conversation, particularly because we are on the unceded and stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and many other Coast Salish nations. So when we talk about the situation in Palestine, for most of us, we immediately recognize the remarkable resonance of what it means to be living within a settler colonial society. And for most of us, we're also beginning to do this personal unpacking. Yes. Recognizing that being settlers, whether we showed up last week or our foreparents arrived here 20, 30, 50, 60, 100 years ago, we are still part of the architecture of the settler colonial project. And so I, I thank you for coming out here today because I know that with the incredible prohibition on the types of conversations we're having, It's not easy to show up, so I thank you for showing up. This alone is one small step towards decolonizing our own hearts and souls. Thank you. So, I'm here today because I was asked to be here, but I am incredibly honored to be with you, Omar, on so many levels. And you are familiar to many people for the work that you've done previously, but if I may venture to say so, this particular work, right, which I'm— I feel I have the privilege to hold in my hand, is an extraordinary work. And it's an extraordinary work for so many different reasons. I'm going to reserve my own thoughts and reflections now, but I will Eventually share them, but I think it's more important to hear from you. The first question that I have for you is, what made you write the book? Not the tweet, but what made you write this book? And was this book being written subconsciously, or did you actively decide, I need to narrativize and render my autobiographical experiences with the genocide of a people into something tangible that can be read and understood and interacted with.

Omar El Akkad: Thank you so much for doing this. First of all, I appreciate it. I, uh, I don't think there is a sort of more accurate or glaring refutation of the idea that we live in a meritocracy than You and me sitting on this stage and me doing most of the talking. That feels just wrong. But I'm grateful for this. I'm grateful for y'all being here. In very early November of 2023, my editor was in town. I live just south of Portland. And he was there for the book festival. And we were getting dinner afterwards. And I was raving and ranting about the one thing I've I'd sort of been raving and ranting about for weeks, which is this idea that I don't know who the hell I am in this part of the world anymore. Since the age of 5, I've been oriented towards this part of the world. It's the reason I sound the way I do. And I often say that if I called any of you up and said my name was John Smith, you'd probably believe me, right? I'm not far away. I've spent a lot of my life Learning how to be not far away. And suddenly all of that had gone to shit, because I felt like when push comes to shove, the things I had made myself believe in with respect to this part of the world that allowed me to hold this orientation felt like they were shaky, if not falling apart entirely. And I think my editor was just so sick of hearing me ramble about this that at one point he was like, okay, You should write about it. You should go. And I had been. I had been sort of sketching my thoughts because it's all I know how to do. I often talk about writing as my first avenue of retreat. When the world doesn't make sense to me, I go and try to figure it out on the page. And I never do. It's just that's the fire exit. And so I did that. And there was an element of freedom to it in the sense that I didn't think there was any way in hell this was going to get published. And so, you can just sit there, and you can write. And apparently, I have a really good agent. I don't know. I don't know what happened. They wanted to buy the book, and suddenly— but, you know, the first draft was done in March, I think. And then suddenly, it was going to become this public-facing thing, and a lot of the work—

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: From that point on was to not let the coward take over.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: 'Cause I'm a huge coward. I leech courage wherever I can get it. I don't— I can't generate my own. And as soon as you know, oh, this is going out into the world, there is an instinct then to, to do essentially what I'm doing right now. When there's more than 2 people in the room, there's a performative aspect. There's always a per— You can't be in this kind of situation and not put on some kind of costume. And to try and keep that away from this became the more difficult sort of narrative challenge.

Adam Davis: Hmm.

Omar El Akkad: But in terms of how the book is structured, which is a sort of interweaving of my life experiences of growing up on the other side of the planet oriented towards here, the journalism and the foreign assignments where I saw the faraway arm of the empire, all of that It became very difficult for me to sort of be writing this kind of book and not engage with the extent to which I am indicted in all of this.

Emily Harris: Hmm.

Omar El Akkad: I am a part of it. First of all, in a very practical sense, I'm killing those kids. My tax money's paying for that. But also in terms of the narrative and rhetorical devices that are available to me to look away from that. Which I could do, right? I could do without any real consequence outside what it does to my soul. And so all of that sort of worked its way into the narrative. But the central starting point was that you're waking up every morning and you're seeing video, audio evidence of the worst things human beings can do to one another.

Adel Iskandar: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: And you're told over and over again that if you oppose this in some way, you're a horrible human being. And what do you do with that? What do you do with the machinery of that? I sat down and wrote. And I don't know if the result is worth a damn, but it's the only thing I know how to do.

Adel Iskandar: I'm flabbergasted and shocked at the extent to which You're self-deprecating about this because— I mean—

Omar El Akkad: It's because you don't know me so well. We've only met like a couple of times, right?

Adel Iskandar: That's true. That's true. But the— and it's— I absolutely understand what it means for one to feel a sense of cowardice, particularly given the degree and extent of privilege that we possess, in contrast to those who are on the receiving end of missiles and munition and tanks and firepower and starvation and all those other sort of incredible mechanisms of collective dehumanization. And so it does seem like a very, very, very small sort of drop in the bucket to be able to stand up or wear a kufiya or wear a watermelon earring or something along those lines. I think it's a very important point. But what you've done is— and I'm not gonna pat your back. I mean, I'll pat your back on the incredible— Oh, you're fishing for compliments.

Omar El Akkad: You're fishing for compliments. I didn't mean a word I said.

Adel Iskandar: I'm trying my best not to.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, yeah.

Adel Iskandar: You baited me, and I'm gonna fall for it. But no, I think what I wanna say here is that what you've done is also an act of confrontation. Well, on one level, you're— I recognize the sort of the sense of cowardice or kind of the fear, the personal fear associated with what it means to put this discourse, these narratives, these challenges out there. But nevertheless, whether it's the desire to be able to sleep better at night or to reconcile with a moral compass, you ended up producing a book that is an unadulterated condemnation of empire in all of its permutations and all of its manifestations, using the pure and simple innocence of childhood as a true indicator and litmus test for that. So that alone is, in my opinion, not really a cowardly act. Or maybe what will transpire in the coming months as a result of publishing it may prove otherwise. But I wanted you to kind of help us think about what it means to take a stand. Did you intend for this book to eventually be a stand?

Omar El Akkad: I think it's the kind of book that sort of barges in through the door pretending to want to pick a bunch of fights.

Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: And so, people have punched back, and they have every right to. I know what I've written. But for me, the sort of— the defining aftertaste of this book is a kind of uncertainty. Again, going back to this notion of not knowing who the hell I am anymore, because this thing that I've been rooted to since I was 5 years old has come unrooted. I don't know who I am on the other side of that. But in the process of coming to terms with that, You find yourself in this situation where everything has to be interrogated, and everything has to be autopsied. I— so one of the things that happened, this is the last event of the Canadian leg of the tour. We've been at this for a week and a half. Is that right? Something like that. And it takes a toll talking about this stuff, right? Absolutely. Like, it's not, you know, not woe is me or whatever. I'm incredibly grateful for this, but you're coming back again and again to this notion of like, what is this? What is this good for? And I say somewhere in the book that I'm not trying to argue with anyone. You know, we're both Arabs. You've seen Arabs argue. People leave the room. They get scared, right? We're yelling at each other. It looks— we're about— you know, it gets heated. And then right afterwards, we like go break our fast together and it's totally cool, right? Like, it's just a very— like, I love to argue. It's amazing. And if we're talking about urban planning, yeah, you know, we're talking about 99.9% of subject matter. Absolutely. Absolutely, let's argue and get in each other's faces. I don't wanna argue with you about a genocide.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: If we are on opposite sides of that argument, there's a chasm between us I can't bridge. And it's not that I have this hatred for you or that I have any emotion for you. There's just a leave-taking that happens there. And so, there's been immense negative reaction to this book, and a lot of it has been valid. And a lot of the most valid criticism has actually come from the left. There's also been a reaction that clearly has come from people who have read the synopsis and have no idea what the hell is in this book. My friend was convinced a while back that Indigo wasn't gonna carry it, and so kept refreshing the page for the— and finally, months ahead of its publication, it shows up. And he's like, hey, check it out. And I was like, ah, I don't care. It doesn't matter.

Emily Harris: But—

Omar El Akkad: But so I look at this thing, and immediately it already had 2 reviews. And it was a 1-star and a 5-star, and neither person had read it. And it's that kind of thing, right? Like, you know what ride you're in for. You know what you're going to— but I'm not interested in this notion of, I'm going to try to reason you To a place that morally you wouldn't have gone to by yourself. Because, you know, it brings out in me all of those things that I talk about when I talk about the self-indictment of the centrist liberal, right, which I was more than happy to adhere myself to.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: So, for example, this notion of You know, these horrible things that are happening to those people all the way over there, they're bad because one day they'll come to you. Like, I find myself, I find an almost magnetic lure to make that argument because I know that it has the best chance of working. You know, right now, yeah, it's the Palestinians and like really, like, you know, that's just what happens over there and it's— but like those pagers could have been on a plane or, you know. Yeah. And you're casting forward to this hypothetical future where somebody whose life matters will have this happen to them. These are the kind of argumentative tools that I find myself drifting towards as soon as I start to think about this idea of the argument, of I'm gonna bring you to my— Mm-hmm. I didn't even reason myself into this place. I have a certain set of moral beliefs, And from those, I extrapolate to the place I'm at. So I don't think of it as an argument, but clearly both the 1-star guy and the 5-star guy thought of it that way.

Adel Iskandar: I think they were looking for an argument. I want to say that we have— there's a tendency for the issue of Palestine, Palestinian rights, Palestinian Palestine liberation, Palestine as an idea, as a concept, to be seen and deemed as inherently complicated, or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as inherently complicated, too complicated to be able to elaborate on, that it's something that is beyond kind of spatial explanation and temporal commitment. We just don't have the time to cover it. And that is a cop-out in the conversation. You've been a journalist for a good number of years and someone who has done, I would say, done a remarkable job trying to tell truths as you saw them in those contexts and in those scenarios, which also inadvertently meant that you were problematizing what you saw.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Adel Iskandar: Readers and audiences and individuals who are engaging with your reporting that it's not as simple as you think it is. It's not so black and white. But somehow, right, when I read this book versus reading your journalism, I come to a distillation that when it comes to what we are witnessing, And have witnessed over the last year and a half in Gaza, it is not complicated. Can you tell me a little bit more about how we can entertain the idea that this is such a simple dynamic? How do we arrive at the conclusion that this cannot be a contestation, it cannot be an argument, Over whether or not you think, you know, Palestinians have the right to exist or be remembered or have a national identity or to, you know, fly a flag or to have national clothes or have a language or a dialect or their own food, you know?

Omar El Akkad: So this book launched on the 25th, I think, of February. And we did the launch in Portland, where I live. We did it at Powell's. And afterwards, I was driving home, and I was listening to NPR. And they were doing a segment on the Republicans trying to cut Medicare. And the interviewer said something like, you know, this Republican— Ted Koppel. lawmaker says that 50% of all Medicare expenditures are fraud. And there was an interview in this— the interview was with a person who actually has to have a relationship with reality. She's a researcher who actually has to, like, you know— and you could tell this woman was just having trouble, you know, not saying, hey, that's complete bullshit, you know, like they say. And instead she was like, well, we have no evidence of this whatsoever. What we do have is, when we do the research, is that there's approximately 5% billing errors. And what was interesting is what the interviewer said next, which was something like, well, you say 5%. This lawmaker says 50%. Is there not a middle ground there? And I'm watching— I'm listening to this, and I'm thinking, like, This is the model. This is the predominant model, and it works perfectly on a level playing field where people are operating in good faith. As soon as that's not the case, this thing is falling apart completely. I came up around journalists, right? Like, I think most of them are working their asses off, and they're trying very, very hard. It's not a job you get into for the money. It's got one of the highest divorce rates of any profession. Mm-hmm. You get yelled at constantly by strangers. My issue is not with the notion of something being complicated. Everything is complicated in some way or another if you think about it hard enough. My issue is with the distance between the story as it would be written in a vacuum with no external pressures applied and the story when it is written under Mm-hmm. And by pressures, I mean the threat of a company pulling its advertising, or no longer giving you access to the CEO because they don't like something you've written, or your editor-in-chief getting angry at you, or those strangers yelling at you on the internet, or your career getting derailed and now you're doing real estate listings because they don't trust you to cover your beat anymore. And the only thing that I think— the only question I think every journalist, myself included, needs to ask themselves with respect to every story is what is the distance between those? What is the distance between the story as you would have written it in a vacuum and the story as you have written it under these pressures? Because that distance is the definition of journalistic malpractice. And it happens to be the case that this is especially glaring in the situation in Gaza and as it relates to Palestinians generally for a very, very long time.

Adel Iskandar: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: Again, I can't tell you that this book is good or bad. I don't have that kind of relationship with my work where I can tell you that. I can tell you that at least when I was writing it, I was trying my best to close that gap. Now, maybe the story in a vacuum was garbage, and maybe I don't know how to write it, and maybe all of that, but I, I couldn't commit To writing this kind of book and having that kind of gap. Mm-hmm. Whereas, to be perfectly honest, I'm sure there were many points in my journalism career where I was quite happy to let that gap grow, because my career aspirations got in the way, or who knows what the hell. So that's the only difference, to me anyway, in terms of the mode I was in when I was writing this book versus the mode that I was in for a lot of my journalism career.

Adel Iskandar: Thank you for that. I have a— I think the other aspect of this book that I found to be incredibly profound and deeply touching on a very personal level, and I wanna say really quickly, as Jorge was introducing us, I was thinking, my goodness, our biographies are actually kind of awfully similar.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Adel Iskandar: It's just that I happen to conceal mine with writings and stuff like that. But we have a similar background, grew up in, you know, same part of the world, migrated to the same part of the world, parents who kind of are contemporaries in different ways. And— but as I was reading this book, I ended up finding that— I mean, initially, it was— I was hoping to learn about your reflections and contemplations and meditations and musings around the genocide from the standpoint of a journalist.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah.

Adel Iskandar: And so— and a writer and a novelist and what have you. And instead, what I ended up feeling is that you were holding the mirror up in front of all of us. I felt it was deeply personal to me because, you know, it was begging the question of, you know— and you weren't doing it in a preachy way, implying like, where were you when the Palestinians were being genocided in Gaza?

Emily Harris: Right.

Adel Iskandar: But quite the contrary, it was sort of you grappling with what it means on a day-to-day basis and trying to—

Omar El Akkad: You're getting the signal to keep it close. I'm getting a signal?

Adel Iskandar: All right.

Omar El Akkad: No, just to keep it close to your—

Adel Iskandar: Oh, almost done? Close to my— okay. All right. Sorry. So I kept thinking to myself, what— this is about me. This is about where I stand. It's about my morality, my litmus testing, where I am in conjunction with this situation. It was also a story of struggling with one's morality and recognizing our inherent and collective failures, right? The fact that even if we commit ourselves to BDS, We are just not moving that handle far enough, that even though we are— we might be saying all the right things, we are still part of institutions that are deeply entrenched in the continuation of the status quo. So I wanted to ask you, were you thinking about us as readers and the extent to which we might find your narration of your personal autobiographical experiences relatable, or were you just telling us how you feel in light of what was happening?

Omar El Akkad: That's a really fascinating question. Also, I think my mic has just stopped working for some reason. Let me just switch. Is that— hold on. Oh, there we go. All right, cool. So I— I tend to go back to this thing Ishiguro once said about all literature just being somebody asking— somebody saying, this is how it feels for me. Can you hear me? Does it also feel that way for you? And I think one of the reasons this book has gotten substantially more traction than I ever thought it would is because the answer to that last question, whether it's affirmative or negative, has been really sort of emphatic. It's produced emphatic answers to that question. But with respect to sort of what I hope the reader would take away from it, or how that sort of reflects in the reading, it's not my first rodeo. It's my third rodeo, which is not that many rodeos, but I've been to 2 other rodeos. And the same thing has happened in both cases, which is— The book I thought I had written and the many, many books that people read were entirely different things. Mm-hmm. The story I always go back to is with American War. My first novel was a book called American War. There's a— the middle segment of that book takes place in a camp for internally displaced US, southern US residents, and it's Camp Patients. And most everything that happens in that section, especially the sort of culminating event, is based very, very closely on Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp where there was a massacre some 40 years ago. Sabra is the Arabic word for patience. That's where that name comes from. But in this part of the world, you're not taught that in high school. Like, most people don't get that reference at all. And so, I would constantly, when I was doing book clubs in this part of the world, I would be asked, why did you have to make it so brutal? And I would explain, you know, some of the lines of dialogue are from witness testimony. Like, the tether is short then. Yeah. But I would get that question over and over again, you know, why did you have to make it so brutal? And then I go do— I think I wrote about this in the book. It stuck with me for a long time. It's— I go do a virtual book club with an Egyptian group for whom Sabra and Shatila is not far away. And the first question is, well, if this is based on Sabran Shatia, why did you tone it down so much? They'd read an entirely different book.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: And so, you have to kind of preemptively brace for that to happen, even in nonfiction, right? Like, a novel can— sure, you read it a million different ways. But the different parts of this that people have latched onto has— it's run the gamut. I had a journalist interview me for the Canadian media swing, and she said it made her wanna quit her job. And I take that as a real compliment. And I shouldn't. This person's a very—

Adel Iskandar: You're putting journalism out of business.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, exactly. I shouldn't—

Adel Iskandar: More than it is.

Omar El Akkad: I shouldn't take so much glee in that, but I'm a petty person, what can I say? There's this principle in architecture where every architect has to, you know, should give some thought to any structure they build. They should give some thought as to how it would look as ruins. And I think writers would do well to think of their books in similar terms. And I have no idea what this looks like as ruins, because the moment— I mean, we were talking about this backstage, about on the other side of this last year and a half, I'm an entirely different person.

Emily Harris: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: Like, there's— you either understand that implicitly or you don't. And I can't explain it to you, right? But— and so, to be writing in the middle of that transformation is, in a very petty, self-centered way, a very dangerous thing, right? And then suddenly the book launches and you're public-facing and— You don't have time to just sit with it and think, you know, how does this die? What does old age look like for a book like this? But it was a very specific sort of intentional thing on my part to not try to preemptively cater to closing the gap between the book I was writing and the many possible interpretations, which is something that hurt me on my second novel.

Adam Davis: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: I had that in the back of my head of, oh my God, I'm trying this thing, but they might read it this way, and it made for a worse book. So even if it wasn't for the state I was in and continue to be in, you know, when I was writing this and now, even just on a craft level, I think at some point you have to sort of shed that obligation to match the million different books that your book is eventually going to become.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Adel Iskandar: This is— it's an extraordinary, um, explanation of, of your sort of cerebral and cognitive, you know, journey of trying to figure out how to, how to tell these, these stories. Um, I will say though that as I was re— as I was reading this, I felt as though I wasn't just accompanying you in this journey, but rather That it was a parallel journey, that what you were witnessing, describing, feeling, your affect, and the way in which you were sort of consecrating and documenting your experiences with the world transforming around you is something that I think everybody in this room would find extremely relatable. This is why events on Palestine are so incredibly full. I mean, they are the most attended events I've ever witnessed. I've been in the academy for 25 years. I've never seen a subject matter get this much attention in all of my time within the academy, honestly. And I think it's a function of the fact that we are looking for a way to not only comprehend the genocide of a people at a time where it is deemed not only appropriate but rather preferable, right? And trying to reconcile where we fit vis-à-vis a collapsing world order. And, and so your book is one that in reading, it is, uh, it is cathartic in, on, in one sense for the reader, but it's, it's also quite inspiring because it allows us to find the language that we are very much at, at odds with, where we're struggling. I, I mean, even though, you know, I write for a living, but I cannot for the life of me imagine being able to produce a work of such, um, effective elegance that really speaks to the heart and soul in a way that, um, that is not only deeply touching But incredibly meaningful. So I just wanted to say that we are with you in this journey, even though you might have written it for audiences. But I don't think that I interacted with this book as an audience member. Quite the contrary, I felt that in a way, I might actually be the author, which is a very unusual and peculiar relationship with a book. How many of you have read books and thought, wait a minute, I think I could have written this. I just can't. You know, I can't, and I will never be able to write this. But thank you for writing the book that I would have loved to write my whole life. You know, I wanted to ask you about representation. This is something we kind of discussed backstage a few minutes ago. But representation— I mean, there's the constant discussion about why aren't communities represented? What does it mean to be represented? Why are we underrepresented? Why are we misrepresented? And I think that for, for many of us who come from communities that are— that have been misrepresented or negatively depicted or challenged in some way, particularly given the architecture of power and the colonial relationships and geopolitics of of all of this. We've sort of been hanging on to this idea that there is a right way for us to be represented and for these issues to be represented. One of the things that I'm— I've often found interesting was the late Edward Said's writings. I mean, he wrote a lot of remarkable things, but in some of his more personal narratives, he talks about how, as a Palestinian, when he would look back at the photographs of his family, the black and white photos taken in the '40s and '50s during a time of displacement and the aftermath of the Nakba, the first Nakba, now that we're talking about subsequent Nakbas, that when he looks at those photos, he realizes how much is missing, how much is outside the frame, how much is not captured, how much is excised. And he reflects that the very act of representation is inherently violent. And I've often thought about this in light of both journalism, one's incapacitation, that inability to render the complexity and the nuances of what you witness and turn it into, you know, now an ever-shrinking amount of text that you're going to get. In a print publication. And the same is true with almost everything else that we do, whether it's reducing it to a tweet, rendering it to status, shooting a short reel. Everything has become so reductive, so short, so abbreviated, so abridged. And so the question that I have is, what does it mean to push back against this?

Omar El Akkad: I think that's a great question. So, early on in the book, I chose to tell the story of when I was about 15, 16 years old. My buddy has just gotten his driver's license, and we're driving around. This was in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Qatar is a little peninsula sticking out of Saudi Arabia, pound for pound the richest place on earth. This is where I grew up. And Qatar is 90% non-Qatari. People have come from somewhere else to cash in on the oil and gas money.

Adam Davis: Yeah.

Omar El Akkad: And the vast majority of those people are so-called third-country laborers. These are people who, predominantly from India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, they built the place. They built the entirety of the place, and they're treated like absolute garbage. Just subhuman conditions. And we're driving by one day, we're driving down the road, and a man, Southeast Asian, Gets into a fender bender with the Mercedes of this Qatari guy. The Qatari guy comes out and is just livid and takes off his sandal and starts beating this guy in the middle of the street, and everybody's slowing down so that they can gawk and honk their horns. And we're part of this, right? We're part of this. And, you know, you think back on it, I keep returning to that memory, and recently it came to me, and I think I talk about it in the book. What this guy had done was not get into a slight fender bender with a Mercedes. He had violated the conditions of his own nonexistence.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: He was there to build the sail-shaped skyscrapers and to do the manual labor and to be nonexistent outside of those confines. Once he stepped outside of that, that became almost existential, right? The whole thing could fall apart. The whole enterprise, the way this society is structured, could fall apart if suddenly this group of human beings are allowed to be human. And because I've been a guest on someone else's land since I was 5 years old, I've lived in a lot of very different places. And I've carried that with me, either consciously or subconsciously, as an assessment of the society I'm in. For this, whatever it is, to work, who needs to be subhuman? Who needs to be non-human? Who needs to not exist in any kind of way that is synonymous with agency? And I keep coming back to this, right? Because— Every society has that version. Every society. We were talking backstage. If you had told me 2 years ago what would it take to take— to bring you back to Qatar, I would have been like, there's nothing. There's nothing you can offer me. I'm not going back. And now, for the first time in my life, I'm like, you know, if I wasn't married and didn't have kids and didn't have root here, like, maybe. My opinion of Qatar hasn't changed. You know, I'm not— My capacity to— live atop a surface layer held up by people I have to continuously think of as subhuman or nonhuman has changed. I used to teach this class on political fiction, whatever the hell that is, and I used to begin by saying, well, all fiction is political, right? It's political by virtue of its active space or its negative space, what you choose to tackle directly or what you feel safe ignoring. And just as a sort of, you know, mini exercise for the students, I would say think of any book, any book at all, any novel. Find a way to fit the word Palestinian into that title and tell me what you think is going to happen to the publishing process of that book. Tell me what you think is going to happen to the publishing process of the Palestinian Da Vinci Code. I'm not changing anything else. That's all we're doing. Thank you. This enforced nonexistence is fundamental to the entire enterprise. And it allows for so many side benefits if you are on the asymmetrical power center of that relationship. Because one of the things you can do is then present the plainly nonsensical argument that because this group is so confined, The horrible things happening here are gonna stay here, which inevitably brings about the counterargument of like, no, no, no, it might again happen to somebody who's— A, it absolutely will, right?

Adel Iskandar: It is.

Omar El Akkad: Like, we're seeing it right now, you know? But B, even if it didn't, that makes it no less morally repugnant. I remember the first time Trump came into power when he was running against Hillary Clinton, He was musing about making American Muslims wear spe— carry special ID cards. Anyone who has a passing knowledge of history is aware of what that tends to be a prelude to.

Adel Iskandar: Or how close we are to that.

Omar El Akkad: Or how close we are to that. And Clinton and a bunch of other Democrats were asked about this, and when she was asked about this, her immediate response segued into how American Muslims are a really important ally in the fight against terror. And you think that's your reason for opposing this? That's what— you can't do this unless you have worked that muscle that allows you to think of certain groups of people at certain points in time as being non-human, as not having met the basic moral threshold, which when applied to any other group of human beings, You would immediately— would immediately cause you to make the obvious moral argument. This is repugnant. Every time I see someone resort to the pragmatic, there is a part of me that's, I think, connected to my own survival instinct that starts to freak the hell out.

Adel Iskandar: Well, of course, because the forced nonexistence can be applicable to anyone at any time. Look at the extent to which anyone with privilege can lose privilege with a flick of a button simply for standing up on this issue. The head of the— the judges of the ICC, the ICJ, every single human rights organization now outright condemned international law being scrapped. There isn't a single individual in this world not immune from condemnation and active and functional erasure for standing up on this issue. So, you know, initially it might have been sort of racialized communities. Of course, there was the good Arab and the bad Arab and those sort of dynamics. But now it doesn't matter. I mean, look at the incredible work that's being done by, you know, Jewish communities who are opposed to the genocide and the manner in which the that they are at the very least admonished and described as self-hating Jews along with various other sort of analogous profanities against selfhood and collective identity, but— and with no room for any kind of liberationist approach to seeing the world. So in my thinking, I'm concerned that there is no room left for anyone. But I'm also shocked and flabbergasted at the extent to which it took this one issue. What is it about Palestine that makes it such a critical turning point whereby those in power are prepared to do away with every aspect of liberal democracy, I mean, that even if it were to be an illusion, that the illusion itself would be done away with and put through a shredder to preserve this sort of golden cow?

Omar El Akkad: I mean, I think it comes back to that idea of what liberation is, right? Like, we live these incredibly siloed existences, particularly in this part of the world, but I don't think in any other part of the world it's not there, where you are afforded the privilege of not caring about the person next to you. But liberation can't exist that way. It just can't. There is no such thing as this kind of selective freedom. That's not freedom. I think with respect To this issue in particular, at least for me. And, you know, I've heard all of the, like, patently bad faith arguments of, like, oh, why do you care about this and not Sudan, or not— you don't care about Sudan, buddy. You don't. You're trying to get me to shut up. This is what's happening, what's actually happening here. Right. You know, the last year and a half has been a real crash course on not bothering to engage with obviously bad faith arguments. It's a real skill set you have to build up. I don't know— like, I know that this isn't normal for me, right? I get 3 people at my events. I know what's— like, there's a sense of like a collective anger and a need to vent and just the space, right? Just the space that's drawing people here. And I can't speak for anyone in this room. I can speak for myself. What has felt fundamentally different about the last year and a half, to me, comes down to 3 things: intimacy, immediacy, and complicity. You know, I wake up and I watch the most intimate horror. Yeah. Like, I now know what it looks like when a little girl starves to death. And I'd seen horrors before. But that's where the immediacy comes in. This is happening in real time in front of me. And then on top of that, the complicity. I'm paying for it. I'm doing that. And I can't get away from it.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: And to be honest, when I go back to this cowardly part of me, there is a cowardly part of me that just wants to look away. Right? We, you know, one of the safest things you can do in the short term right now is just keep your head down. Just wait. Like, honestly, the title of the book is the title of the book for a reason, right? It'll be safe one day. But I don't think that, at least in my case, you can see this happening before your eyes. You can be presented— and I mean, like, I'm a storyteller. That's all I know how to do. I was watching a documentary once with this guy about this guy who had memorized pi. To like 8 billion digits. And they did this experiment where they were just reading it back to him. And when they got to like the 800th digit, they deliberately changed it to something wrong. And when they said it, you could see him wince. I have that with stories.

Adel Iskandar: Mm-hmm.

Omar El Akkad: When a narrative container is full of shit, when the narrative doesn't make sense, I have a sort of gut reaction. And so you're watching this horror. And you're being handed a narrative container that's supposed to make this okay. And it's not working. I don't know how to be functional in my capacity to ignore anymore. I just don't know. And so, you know, I talk about this book, and it's— I don't know if it's going to do a damn thing, but like, this is all I could think about, and it's all I could write about. And if I sit there and think, well, yeah, just let the storm pass, and then afterwards, you know, you can write really moving stories about the horror, I don't know that I could call myself a writer.

Emily Harris: Right.

Omar El Akkad: I'm engaged in something else, but I don't think it's something that fits my definition of what a writer does. We're supposed to say something about what it means to be human. And my education, in the most horrible ways, in what it means to be human has been an immense one over the last year and a half. We have narrative sort of trajectories. We have pattern recognition. We know how this sort of thing goes. We saw it. I came of age— I was 19 when September 11th happened. A lot of my early adult life was in the war on terror, post-war on terror years. And you see the narrative arc, and it always begins with silence. Yeah. But then the door slides open a tiny bit, and who comes crawling through it first? The former Marine who wants to write the short story collection about how sad it made him to go to Iraq and kill all those brown people, right? Like, you know the narrative arc is one day going to get to a place where there's an honest account. You just have to go through a lot of bullshit first.

Adam Davis: Um.

Omar El Akkad: I just, I just— you can't experience that and come out the other side the same. And any argument you give me about how this is necessary, or that there's a worse evil on the other side of it if we don't do this, or all of that, Is going to change fundamentally the reaction to listening to a 6-year-old girl beg for her life before Israeli soldiers shoot that car 355 times. It's just not. And so we're here.

Adel Iskandar: Thank you. Thank you for producing a book That punctures the pomposity of power and pierces through so much bullshit to produce something very raw, very honest, and deeply human. I want to invite you, if it's okay with you, to just read a short passage of your choosing from the book, just to—

Omar El Akkad: Sure.

Adel Iskandar: Help us conclude.

Omar El Akkad: So a few months ago, the people at Penguin Random House's audio division called up, and they were like, we can't get anyone else to read this thing. Like, we're not going to do that to them. These are hardworking voice actors. They don't deserve this. So you got to do it. So I wandered into a studio in Portland, and these 2 poor sound engineers had to sit with me and just go through it. I don't have much experience with that kind of work, but I did do a podcast that nobody listened to, but I did the podcast for a year and a half. And the whole time I was doing this podcast, the producers would keep saying, like, Yeah, okay, can you like perk it up a little bit? Or just give us a little bit more energy, like sound like you want to be here, just something? And I'd be like, no, you obviously don't know me. That's not going to happen. But then the funny thing is I went to the studio to read this and they were like, you're perfect. This is exactly the correct vibe to be bringing to this project. So that's what you're in for. I spent a month and a half, I think, maybe more, on the prologue, which is longer than I spent on anything else, which I think is the case for a lot of writers. Like, your first few pages, you just hammer away at for a while. But anyway, I'm going to read you— I'm going to try to read you the prologue.

Emily Harris: Thank you.

Omar El Akkad: Hold on. You think I'd done this enough to know, like, the hand microphone? All right, this is— this will work. She is fog-colored when they find her. She believes she has ended. Like porters in service of some grotesque nobility, half a dozen men carry the stretcher out of something cavernous, something that used to be a home. And she, a girl of 9 or 10, Is whisked away. Sitting on the stretcher, dazed and bloodied, she looks off to the side. She appears to be searching. The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble. Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching. A soldier I met years ago who made the study of industrial violence his hobby once told me that the first thing that kills when a bomb goes off isn't shrapnel or fire. It's the overpressure wave, air forced violently outward from the site of the blast. What you're supposed to do, he said, is drop to the ground and cover your ears. Breathe out. Empty your lungs before the air collides with and flattens them. Of course, if you're close enough, nothing you do or don't do will make any difference at all. He said the force of the overpressure wave weakens in proportion to the cube of the distance from the site of impact, which is to say the most effective thing you can do to avoid getting killed by a missile or a mine Or a grenade is to be far away when it goes off. How do you do that? I asked. Do what? Know when a thing like that is about to happen. Know to be far away. Well, he said, and trailed off. A few minutes later, he was telling the story of a freak accident his daughter had suffered as a toddler, how carrying her to the emergency room was the scariest thing he'd ever experienced. Even in his line of work, even with all he'd seen, the scariest thing. As the men carry the girl out of what used to be her home, she asks if they're gonna take her to the cemetery. One of the men says, Masha'Allah, Masha'Allah. In literal translation, the word means, what God wills. A closer approximation of meaning Of one meaning is something like, what has happened is what God willed. But English tasked with a word like this turns stiff and monophonic, and masha'Allah is orchestral. To any ear that grew up on this language, it is clear that what the man means when he says this word is something else entirely, something instantly familiar to generations who've heard it spilling out the mouths of beaming grandmothers At the end of piano recitals and graduation ceremonies, and at the first sight of a newborn. Used this way, it finds its principal purpose as an expression of joy. Look at this wonderful thing God has done. Masha'Allah. Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, There is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language, a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence, as though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empire's most bloodthirsty fringe, But the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic but necessary because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home, without school, without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism. The girl on the stretcher believes she has ended. A man says to her, "انت زي الأمور." You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase. A lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading, that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world. Zayil Omar. Something has ended here, but something else begins. The dead dig wells in the living. Thank you.