Omar El Akkad’s memoir confronts the moral vacuum at the heart of the Western liberal establishment, finds Chris Nineham

How to act in a time of genocide? What to do when your so-called leaders are silent or colluding? These are question many are asking and they are the starting points for Omar El Akkad’s brilliant new essay, reflection and memoir.

El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian former foreign correspondent and novelist. He says here that he never wanted to do anything other than write. This turned out well because he is a writer of rare ability. On some pages, there are three or four sentences so telling and finely crafted you want to commit them to memory.

The book weaves autobiography with a controlled but furious tirade against the wars the Western world has waged on the Palestinians and the people of the Middle East in general.

The two things are inseparable because his life has been shaped by those wars. Now living in the ‘woods of Oregon’, he also experiences what he calls a ‘severance’ in which he wonders if he will ever take his daughter back to his homeland: ‘In truth, I lean away from the faraway side of my daughter’s lineage on her behalf because for more than forty years I’ve seen what carrying that weight means’ (p.10).

The book keeps coming back to the pain of witnessing the Palestinians’ trauma, to the wildly different human responses to the catastrophe and the bad faith and hypocrisy of the liberal establishment. In the process, it raises afresh questions about the abuse of language, what shapes human action and whether courage and solidarity have the potential to win out over narrowness and self-interest.

Moral corrosion

El Akkad’s mood oscillates. ‘A world that shrugs at a genocide’ he says, ‘has developed a terrible immunity’ (p.165), but also, later, ‘it is not hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is more potent than contagion’ (p.186).

Just as James Baldwin saw that racism in America corroded the whole of US politics and culture, El Akkad rages at the way foreign wars have poisoned Western society. More than anything, he keeps coming back to the moral collapse of the liberal establishment. There has been, he writes ‘a cascade of institutional gutlessness in the arts establishment’ (p.97).

He brilliantly deconstructs the liberals’ defensive moves against gestures of defiance. ‘What is to be gained’, he has them say, ‘some kind of moral cleanliness; be serious,’ (p.171), and, ‘you call for disinvestment and yet still use electricity’. As he says, the purpose of such objections ‘is never moral concern’: ‘To be accused of speaking too loudly against one injustice by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told simply to be quiet’ (p.171).

The events of the last sixteen months have in fact led El Akkad to the conclusion that the collapse of the liberal centre wasn’t really a collapse at all, more a moment when everyone sees its fundamental flaws: ‘I begin to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t.’

He is coruscating about the argument for the lesser evil that has led some to attack critics of the Democratic Party. No one anymore should stoop so low as to say, ‘don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the fact that a Trump administration would be so much worse’ (p.58). As he says, ‘there exists a point at which relative harm can no longer be offset against absolute evil’ (p.58).

It is not just that the lesser-evil position has led even so-called progressives to airbrush atrocity. El Akkad makes the crucial point that the crazed and open reaction of today’s Republicans is only possible because of the ‘empty pageantry’ of the Democrats:

‘Against such hollow gesturing, even the most unhinged republican will always be able to say: Look these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gesture. I’ll do away with gestures and make the right people suffer. It is an astoundingly successful technique, but wouldn’t be if the leadership of the Democratic Party has come to realise that sloganeering without concrete actions means nothing’ (p.57).

Liberalism’s failure

Previously on the inside of it, he is a brilliant and frankly hilarious critic of the contortions of the liberal media. He captures the essence of its pitiful postmodern relativism by quoting a commentator at the Economist. ‘As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas’, writes the expert, ‘the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested’ (p.168).

Typically, El Akkad shows deep and dangerous irrationality of this judgement by rephrasing the thought in one sarcastic standalone: ‘it is destiny for facts to be fiercely contested’ (p.168).

He cites a Guardian headline: ‘Palestinian journalist hit in head by bullet during raid on terror suspect’s house.’ The passivity of such language, he points out, serves a real purpose:

‘It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who, weaned on such framing, can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it’s all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very complicated’ (p.71).

At times, El Akkad admits bewilderment faced with such different responses to criminal acts. At others, he is deeply insightful about the sway of privilege, power and class interest. He says he struggles to define Western liberalism, but his efforts are worthwhile. It is, he says:

‘Something at its core transactional, centred on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathising with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them’ (p.26).

In one particularly brilliant passage, he sees clearly where solidarity comes from: ‘When the lies are so glaring and the bodies so many, millions will come to understand there is no such thing as “those people”. Instinctively this will be known to those who have seen it before, who have seen their land or labor stolen, and people killed and know the voracity of violent taking.’

And this is one of the many reasons why El Akkad’s book is so precious. He confronts the horror of the situation unsparingly, but he doesn’t allow himself or us the luxury of despair. There is no discussion of strategy here, but this book is all the same a stirring call to action. It can be that because he understands that one effect of the current horror is to expose the bankruptcy of a whole system:

‘What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thinking it serves and said: I want nothing to do with this’ (p.28).