Dan Scones
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on the atlas · 35
- DaVinci Resolve 201 savers
- For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyee1 savers
- “There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto Life1 savers
- Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hub1 savers
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in General, Marx, 18441 savers
- Lordship and Bondage1 savers
- The immortality of the writer1 savers
- View of Watching Through a Frame: Windows and Balconies as Motifs in Contemporary Diasporic Arab Literature1 savers
- Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress Following the Soviet-United States Summit Meeting in Geneva | Ronald Reagan1 savers
- Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations | Ronald Reagan1 savers
- What is it about foxes | Brittney Corrigan | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Extirpation | Brittney Corrigan | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Dispersal | Brittney Corrigan | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- TRYING TO DESTROY THE KITCHEN WINDOW WITH A JEWEL-ENCRUSTED EGG IS FUTILE. | Brandon Amico | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Notes on the Poem | Brandon Amico | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Cut-glass Goblet | Ginger Ko | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- understory | Mackenzie Carignan | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- insufflate | Mackenzie Carignan | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Doctrine of No Surprises | Franziska Hofhansel | $ – Poetry Is Currency2 savers
- Intimate Disgrace | Franziska Hofhansel | $ – Poetry Is Currency1 savers
- Who Said It Was Simple | The Poetry Foundation2 savers
- Workplace Violence and Harassment Awareness - Free Online Course | WSPS1 savers
- They Sit Together on the Porch | The Poetry Foundation1 savers
- An Exercise in Love | The Poetry Foundation1 savers
- Felix Culpa-bility: Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold… | Poetry Foundation1 savers
- Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost | Poetry Foundation1 savers
- Tasting Braille by Kathi Wolfe | Poetry Magazine1 savers
- Gerard Manley Hopkins by Leontia Flynn | Poetry Magazine1 savers
- Paris Syndrome by Victoria Kennefick | Poetry Magazine1 savers
- The God Called Poetry by Robert Graves | Poetry Foundation1 savers
- Politics and the English Language | The Orwell Foundation23 savers
- Good Bones by Maggie Smith | Poetry Foundation8 savers
- The Glass Essay by Anne Carson | Poetry Foundation6 savers
- Poem of the Day | Poetry Foundation4 savers
- Ada Limón — “To Be Made Whole” | The On Being Project2 savers
highlights · 727
The state has a much harder time punishing you for what you don’t do, what you don’t buy. But I do wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to make the pragmatic argument for non-violence, where the moral one was enough.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeThis is something Baldwin talked about towards the end of his life. It’s an asymmetric arena of engagement. Whereas love, compassion, joy — those are all asymmetric in the other direction. The state has no idea what to do with that. Non-involvement. image atom For Campus Encampments Supporting Gaza, What’s Next? read more The state has a much harder time punishing you for what you don’t do, what you don’t buy. But I do wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to make the pragmatic argument for non-violence, where the moral one was enough.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeI would love to live in a world where I could make the case that non-violence is a moral imperative. I can make it for myself, but increasingly, I’m shown that I don’t live in that world. My argument now for nonviolence is much more pragmatic. The state has the bigger guns.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeIt’s real easy to say all of this stuff when you live on the launching side of the missiles. I’m not sure that there’s a single belief I have, or a single piece of certainty that I hold onto, that might not be immediately obliterated the second someone hurts a loved one of mine.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeIt’s been one of the most legitimate sources of criticism levelled at the book: you talk about resistance to injustice, and then you get real squishy around the idea of armed resistance. And I have no defense against that. I really don’t.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyee“One of the most lasting consequences of the war on terror,” you write, “is the utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence.” At another point you say that revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child. I’m reminded of Nina Simone shouting at MLK: “I’m not non-violent!” And he says, “Sister, you don’t have to be.” It seems like you’re saying something similar.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeBecause I’ve been watching horrific things happen to far away people for a very long time now, and I’ve seen a very muted response on the part of people who — when it is close, when the horror is even orders of magnitude less, but near — are very capable of generating that outrage.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeIt’s fascinating watching people respond with justified and near-apocalyptic rage to being on the receiving ends of the whims of an empire, being told that they are subservient and they are to be a kind of resource to the empire. Because you’re sitting there watching it, and you’re thinking: this isn’t far away for you anymore.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyee“a terrible thing is happening to you now.”
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeBy definition, one of them is labelled a left-wing party, and one of them is labelled the right-wing party, when there’s no real relationship with reality. We don’t have a left-wing party and right-wing party: we have a centre-right party and a quasi-fascist cult.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeWhen the system has been created to serve you, an attack on the system feels like an attack on you. And all of this, I think, is compounded by the specific situation I live in, in the U.S., where there’s a real sort of binary power structure where there are only two political parties that have any chance in hell of running the thing.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeBut I think you did a good job of explaining: everyone is disappointing
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyeebecause these issues might be sorted out by the time your book is ready. Sorted out? What world do you live in that racism won’t still be timely a year from now?
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeI think that, in a vacuum, this idea of non-partisanship as it applies to something like journalism, is fantastic. It’s a great idea. But when the entirety of your context is deeply partisan, it can’t help but fail.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeThat’s certainly true within journalism, where the performance of centrism often means looking away. Especially when one’s very existence is leftist, when the racialized body is leftist and the onus is on me, as a Black journalist, to prove that I can “do centrism” despite coming into the industry with literal skin in the game.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyeewhere the reward for looking away from something just greatly outweighs the personal benefits of trying to do something about it.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeAnd not speaking out about it. I’m thinking about the line early on where you talked about the man who “violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence,” which is what you’re doing with this work.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyeethis notion of not just what costumes you’re asked to wear so as to assimilate or supposed to better fit in, but also the degree to which you’re rewarded for that.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeWhen you talk about assimilation, and the distance between “Who one is and who they must become”, I thought, I’ve done that work too, only to reach the point where, looking back, it was all just deeply irrational. And then there’s a coming apart. I wonder how you begin to rebuild when you step out of that fog, so to speak.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeNow I’ve spent my entire adult life orienting myself towards a particular part of the world, towards a particular kind of liberalism, and I feel unanchored from that. But the problem is that I don’t know who I am on the other side of that. So there’s a deep uncertainty that runs through the entire book.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeRather than, say, pitching a solution to the horrors, your book invites readers to sit in that “numb, overriding grief,” that despair, and to reflect, as you write, on “the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.” Admittedly, it sounded very jaded, but it feels revolutionary.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The Tyee“It’s no use, in the end,” El Akkad writes, “to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned centre of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.”
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeTa-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book, The Message, criticized Israeli occupation of the region in no uncertain terms. In his book Coates drew parallels between Israel’s presence in Gaza to the racial segregation that defined America’s Jim Crow South and admits he’d been misled by Western propaganda.
For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad | The TyeeI don’t know anymore. Every day I wake up and see evidence of horror, but I also see the doctor who goes into the warzone to perform reconstructive surgery on kids. I see people chaining themselves to the fences of weapons manufacturers. This is what keeps me functioning. I was on a Zoom call for a non-fiction climate anthology I contributed to, and the final question was, “What gives you hope?” The last guy to answer, whose home had burned down in the California wildfires, said, “We’ve screwed things up so badly that there is no hope. But we must proceed as though there is.” That’s the only w…
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeDo you believe this book can help cause meaningful change?
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeOver the next few years, avoiding friction may mean taking a stand against the genocide.
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeTo me, that’s like saying, “Ah, you oppose air pollution and yet you continue breathing air! Hypocrite!” Every facet of my life could be considered hypocritical under that lens, and that accusation is always going to be a tool in the arsenal of anybody who believes that the current system works for them. But the people who make that argument don’t actually care about the hypocrisy. They want me to shut up. My advice to activists is: don’t take advice from people who hate you and your cause.
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeIf there’s so much wrong with our core institutions, is it even possible to preserve one’s moral soul in the way you’re describing?
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeIf that means walking away from politics, how do we get anything done?
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeOne of the fascinating things about the US election is that it crystallized this hierarchy of human value. In the months leading up to the election, all of my liberal friends told me that no matter how bad the genocide got, I had to vote Democrat because the alternative would be so much worse. But I can’t maintain the dissociation necessary to choose between active bloodlust and passive bloodlust. I can’t participate in the charade, and I’m going to suffer for it, because Donald Trump is indeed going to be worse. But there’s a line for me that’s absolute, not relative, and this is it
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeYou write that there comes a point when it’s necessary to step away from electoral politics for the sake of preserving one’s moral soul. Do you still feel that way after the US election?
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeI don’t know how to live in a world like that, much less how to live in one where that’s condoned and even celebrated. I can’t tell someone that they need to watch these videos and hear the screams, but god, I want to.
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeI have a very difficult time answering this question. My first instinct is to say that it’s the absolute least we can do.
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeYou point out that much of the language we use today to talk about war—like the word “terrorism” itself—comes from the post-9/11 era. How does that affect our understanding of current events?
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeLanguage is inherently insufficient. Good writing happens when people struggle in good faith between the thoughts in their head and the inadequacy of words to express them. But that dissonance can be used in bad faith as well, particularly in institutional language. At Guantanamo, there were no “interrogations,” only “reservations.” Last year, a British TV anchor described the Israeli military killing a four-year-old girl in the West Bank by saying, “A stray bullet found its way into a van and killed a four-year-old young lady.” In that kind of fog, anything can be allowed. Most of the reporti…
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeI was 19 when September 11 happened. Essentially, the entirety of my adult life has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror. I’ve covered the war in Afghanistan and been to Guantanamo Bay several times. I’ve had people comment on my stories online saying, “I don’t trust a story on terrorism written by a guy named Omar.” Those moments shook my faith, but they didn’t break it. Only over the past year has something broken in me.
“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy - Toronto LifeI have no right to do that. No right at all. And so the closest thing to catharsis that came with the writing of this book was being forced to sit with the contradictions in my own interpretation of myself. I don’t know if I’ve resolved any of those, but being forced to sit with them has changed me as a person almost as much as the last year and a half has.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubI don’t think it’s going to be remembered, but if it is remembered, I think it’ll be remembered as one of the tamest of its kind. It is, however, impossible to write a book like this and not stare down all of the intellectual and moral shortcuts that you’ve been allowed to take as a result of living in the heart of the empire, as a result of making yourself acceptable to the empire. One of the parts that I ended up rewriting quite a bit had to do with this idea of armed resistance and violence because, again, I go back to this notion of being a fairly committed pacifist, but it’s not enough to…
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubBut you know, after a while, you get pretty sick of being proven wrong over and over again.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubOn top of everything else, the thing that they, the outright fascists, want to happen is currently happening.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubThe hope that, if call yourself a liberal, if you—on every other issue—have at least a passing concern for human suffering, then I can make the case to you that these aren’t some far away people whose liberation is entirely irrelevant to yours. I can’t make that case to someone who’s an outright fascist.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubThe effort to point out the hypocrisies and the silences of liberal friends, and ostensibly liberal institutions, however, is worthwhile because there’s still a faint hope that you can change them. If not through persuasion, then through shame. And when that might be the difference between, at the highest level, a higher or a lower body count halfway around the world, it feels like the only fight worth fighting.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hubthe idea that there’s an almost refreshing honesty to the conservative media platform on this issue which at least allows you to know where you stand, and so you don’t have to waste energy engaging.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hubit always seems like the answer to these questions should be obvious: that there is no hope or expectation for a side that is so naked about its intentions.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hubthere is a very emotionally and psychologically calorie intensive effort that has to be done on the part of the mainstream liberal to engage in a kind of dissociation from everything they want to be seen as believing, which is to say, you know, apartheid is wrong, except in this case where it’s good and necessary and must continue. Segregation is wrong, except in this case. I think it puts one in a position that causes a kind of intellectual fracture, and I don’t know that there’s anything new about that, but to see so many people so determined to look away—because otherwise they would have to…
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hubmy fury is directed more at people who looked away than the people who actively cheered this on.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubWhat am I going to push her on? What are you talking about? And I thought to myself, well, she’s in power right now.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubI had a friend who, the day before the election, had posted something about how it was important right now to vote for Harris and then push her on Gaza and push her on climate change afterwards
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubHow do you stack up somebody who is liberal on a host of social issues but sees all Palestinians as potential terrorists and thinks the bombing should continue, against a nativist Republican who has no interest in foreign conflicts but is anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion? How can you tell me one of those people to somebody that I shouldn’t speak to and the other one is somebody who is on the side of the angels. It has complicated a lot of things in a very uncomfortable way.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary HubOur liberal institutions, authors that we might be on panels with, neighbors that have cringey but well-meaning signs in their front yards—these are people who may have been in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Middle East policy, or at least who may not have disagreed with it enough to even throw up a social media post objecting to it.
Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West ‹ Literary Hub