Omar El Akkad

“Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing--an understanding that the machinery of the West has never had much of…

— Omar El Akkad

“Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas,…

— Omar El Akkad

“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced…

— Omar El Akkad

“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again,…

— Omar El Akkad

“It amazed her, the length at which old men could talk. She wondered if it wasn't the sound of his own voice,…

— Omar El Akkad

“You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make…

— Omar El Akkad

“You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”

— Omar El Akkad

“Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.”

— Omar El Akkad

“She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self defense.”

— Omar El Akkad

“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active…

— Omar El Akkad

“You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they…

— Omar El Akkad

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

— Omar El Akkad

“But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in…

— Omar El Akkad

“I am back home by a riverbank and I am happy and I still lover her. My secret is that I still…

— Omar El Akkad

“One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end…

— Omar El Akkad

“forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the…

— Omar El Akkad

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few…

— Omar El Akkad

“It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But…

— Omar El Akkad

“Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?" "Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights…

— Omar El Akkad

“And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the…

— Omar El Akkad

“In late February 2024 I talk to a friend of mine, a Palestinian Canadian author whose debut novel, rejected by many publishers,…

— Omar El Akkad

“I’m sorry, Sarat.” “Why’d you do it?” she asked me. “I just wanted to know.” “Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said.…

— Omar El Akkad

“It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it…

— Omar El Akkad

“the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its”

— Omar El Akkad

“One of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case…

— Omar El Akkad