Omar El Akkad
The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Omar El Akkad reads as The Strategist because his project is diagnostic before it is expressive. Rather than protesting Western institutional failure, he dissects it, decoding journalistic euphemism, colonial narrative structure and performative liberalism with the precision of someone who worked inside those systems at close range. Each book is a deliberate analytical instrument, built to expose the gap between stated values and enacted ones. The novelist's imagination serves the strategist's method.
“I have no doubt that the value system that allows someone to stand in opposition to injustice is alive and well. I just don't trust the power centres to be the gatekeepers of that.”
“The news is always taking sides, even in the choice of what to cover. The veneer of objectivity is a fun thing to have when everything else is working well. But when it's not, yes, you have to take sides.”
“Once that muscle of looking away is developed, it can be exercised along any lines. Eventually that hits a wall. It sort of has to.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Omar El Akkad: Gaza war made me 'deeply cynical' about the West”
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