I hadn't intended to read this next, but it became available from my requests and I had a little peek at it and then didn't stop. Pages vary in e-versions, as always, but I'm assured by the library and Amazon that it's a book of 208 pages, so that's the official ruling.
Day 1 (DDRD 3,016) February 3, 2026
Read to page 57, and didn't even want to stop then...and will probably go back for more. Here's why:
"It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist." (13)
"It has been, for as long as I can remember, the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice: an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable." (15)
"In this place, at this time, people who looked like him were to be invisible. They could perform labor and be paid wages, but as vessels of agency beyond the most necessary transactions, they quite simply did not exist. They were not subhuman, they were nonhuman, non-anything. To allow oneself to think otherwise risked having to contend with the reality that this whole place lived on top of people who looked just like this man. It risked an indictment of an entire narrative, a self-told story of being. It risked everything.
"I return to the memory of that moment often, the way we watched and laughed, didn’t think for a second to stop, to interfere, as the man in the Mercedes assaulted someone whose existence he had been so rudely forced to acknowledge. It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?" (19 - 20)
"For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power." (26)
"...in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it." (56)
"Whatever the quality of its rhetoric, any politics that buckles at the prospect of even mildly inconveniencing the rich, or resisting an ally’s genocidal intentions, will always face an uphill battle against a politics that actively embraces malice. “Yes We Can” is a conditional. “Yes We Will” is not." (61)
∞
I read this at the beginning of Chapter Five:
"To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die."
And I thought surely not. Then I went looking. It took no effort at all to find this:
Gaza man with Down's syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC
And I wondered, as you probably did, why I hadn't heard of this story. So I Googled the man's name--Muhammed Bhar--and New York Times. Here's what I found:
Then I tried the same with Washington Post. Same results. It's almost as if the USA's media were being manipulated.
Also, read to page 114. I suspect I'll be finishing this one off tomorrow.
Day 2 (DDRD 3,017) February 4, 2026
Read to page 189 (= 208)...The End.
An alternate title for this book could be Why Liberal Cowardice Has Allowed Fascism to Triumph in the United States of America. Or, to get de Tocqueville-y about it, How a Fascist State Must Be Created by Liberal Hypocrisy. And here we are.
"On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice rules that Israel must stand trial for genocide. Not long after, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and six other nations decide to cut off all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, one of the few organizations providing any aid to Palestinians." (118)
For an alternate point of view, here's
Ocasio-Cortez Statement on the First Anniversary of October 7th
Washington, D.C. - On the first anniversary of the October 7th terrorist attacks in Israel, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released the following statement:
“The violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, murdering more than 1,200 people and kidnapping hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, was a crime against humanity and an atrocity that will shock generations to come. It was the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. I have seen footage from that day. I will never forget it.
“In the weeks after the attack, I met with hostage families whose loved ones were being held in Gaza. Their message to me and to the world was clear: we can save the hostages, secure a ceasefire, and stop the needless suffering of Israeli hostages and Palestinians alike.
“Instead, Prime Minister Netanyahu pursued a path of mass revenge, killing over 40,000 Palestinians, blocking humanitarian aid, pushing Gaza to the brink of famine while only further endangering the lives of hostages, and consistently undermining ceasefire negotiations.
“One year after the attack, the region is barreling toward even wider conflict. The Biden Administration has failed in its responsibility and own stated goals to prevent a wider regional conflict. The administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. Leahy laws and humanitarian standards has contributed to the devastation in Gaza, added to the profound human toll on and since October 7th, and allowed the conflict to escalate.
“None of this was inevitable. And it can still be stopped. Hamas, Israel, and Hezbollah should agree to a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. The Biden Administration must uphold U.S. humanitarian law and withhold offensive military support when it is violated. The world must come together to build a lasting peace. All of us must protect our Jewish communities at home and abroad from rising antisemitism. All of us must demand respect for the lives of Palestinians and human rights everywhere. The only way to end these horrors is through a diplomatic solution.”
https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-statement-first-anniversary-october-7th
So there's that. This woman has more guts and bigger balls than all of the other members of Congress combined and multiplied by 17.
"How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close." (124)
"Power absent ethics rests on an unshakable ability and desire to punish active resistance—to beat and arrest and try to ruin the lives of people who block freeways and set up encampments and confront lawmakers. But such power has no idea what to do against negative resistance, against someone who refuses to buy or attend or align, who simply says: I will not be part of this. Against the one who walks away." (155 - 156)
Is that last sentence a reference to Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"?
I think this might be the perfect summary of this book: "What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that a sufficient number of children have been murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous?" (165)
And this is too important not to quote at length:
"...every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things—trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground—and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance. Maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter. It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don’t actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk." (166)
If that's not a mission statement, I don't know what is.
I just found a critique of this book entitled "Author Omar El Akkad’s Bizarre Anti-Israel Ravings Receive Uncritical Coverage In Toronto Star, Globe And Mail & Toronto Life" by HonestReporting Canada (What? No name?) dated March 5, 2025. Hmmm.
This was ons of the most powerful books I've read. Very disturbing, of course, but wouldn't it have to be? Well worth your time.
P.S. I just checked out Omar El Akkad's first book, American War. Watch this space.
