Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.

I'm Christian Guru Murphy.

This is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives

and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is a Canadian Egyptian writer called Omar L. Akkad.

And he's written a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

It is essentially motivated by watching the unfolding of the killing in Gaza that has followed October the 7th and his reaction to that, his feelings

about that, his feelings about how Western nations, Western liberal democracies and people

who feel that they uphold all the traditions of that have reacted to the war, the killing

and have largely allowed it to happen or looked the other way.

And it weaves his reactions to the Gaza war with his own experience and the experience of his

family moving from Egypt to Canada via Qatar and his new reflections on what happened to them

in the light of how he now feels, which is quite dislocated from the society in which he lives

and which he calls home. Omar, thank you very much indeed for joining us. It's my pleasure.

This is a remarkable book coming when it is. And it feels a

little bit like a sort of a howl of rage. How did it come about? In early November of 23, my editor was in

town in Portland and we were out to dinner and I was raving and ranting about how I didn't understand what my relationship was in town in Portland, and we were out to dinner, and I was raving and ranting about how

I didn't understand what my relationship was to the West anymore in light of the slaughter in Gaza.

And I think he might have gotten so sick of hearing me do this.

And a few days later, he called up and said, you should write about it.

And I had already sort of started sketching it out because writing is my avenue of first retreat. And so I was trying to make sense of it on the page. But it's,

what happened was that then for months on end, it was the only thing I was able to write about.

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