Egyptian-American author Omar El Akkad’s recent book entitled: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” reportedly requires the reader to “look with him at the horror” of the impact of the Hamas-Israel war on Gaza, according to a recent review in The Globe and Mail.

Reviewed by Toronto Life and The Globe and Mail on February 21, and by The Toronto Star the following day, El Akkad excoriated the “establishment’s” reaction to what has happened in Gaza, saying in an interview with The Toronto Star that “my faith in institutions has effectively crumbled — and I’m talking here about political, academic, cultural, a lot of journalistic institutions.”

In November 2023, El Akkad signed an open letter calling for the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails (including convicted terrorists), and denying Israel’s right to exist. He protested Scotiabank’s financial support for the literary Giller Prize due to the bank’s investment in an Israeli defence company. His X (formerly Twitter) account contains multiple posts in the week after October 7, 2023, damning Israel’s response, yet none condemning Hamas’s heinous massacre, war crimes and hostage-taking.

His one-sided, assumptive view was held up as a hallowed item by all three outlets, holding his anti-Israel activism on some kind of an altar.

In Toronto Life, reporter Anthony Milton quoted El Akkad saying, “I was watching a group of people be eradicated while the Western world was cheering it on,” yet Milton neglected to challenge El Akkad at all. Eliminated? Gaza has a population of 2.3 million. Likewise, Milton didn’t challenge his bizarre, unsubstantiated statement that anyone is “cheering it on,” while swathes of media reporting have been found to be heavily biased against Israel.

Lawrence Hill, writing for the Globe and Mail, shockingly opened by saying, “Some of the most haunting works of fiction depict the oppressed becoming oppressors,” and went on to say, “El Akkad calls on Western governments and citizens to shrug off their apathy and intervene to stop the state of Israel – created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.”

That Israel is called the victim-turned-oppressor on the same weekend that Hamas terrorists paraded vulnerable and traumatized Israeli hostages to cheering crowds of “innocent Gazan civilians” was not mentioned. Their likewise macabre treatment of the strangled corpses of the Bibas brothers from Israel was ignored. The torture of the hostages who suffered sexual, physical, and psychological abuse was likewise omitted. It is El Akkad and Hill who need to “shrug off their apathy”.

Deborah Dundas, an opinion editor for The Toronto Star, likewise offered no balance to El Akkad’s view that Israel is the guilty party. El Akkad told her that Gaza “has been essentially closed off to the rest of the world while a slaughter takes place,” while she made no effort to tell readers that the truth is radically different from his outlandish statements.

El Akkad was quoted in Toronto Life saying: “Because I’m going to call what’s happening in Palestine a genocide,” and in The Globe and Mail as saying that: “the Israeli military… enacted a campaign of active genocide against the Palestinian people” with the newspaper adding that according to, “Palestinian authorities,” “at least 48,218 Palestinians” have been killed.

Gaza must be the only place where genocide has been alleged and there has been simultaneous robust population growth. Likewise, El Akkad’s source – likely the Gaza Health Ministry – is under Hamas’s control, and is therefore suspect, to say the least. Hamas’ figures don’t differentiate between the estimated tens of thousands of Hamas fighters killed and non-combatants, and, according to a report from the London-based Henry Jackson Society, also counts thousands of Gazans who died natural deaths.

Not to be outdone, the Canadian Press (CP) featured its own profile of El Akkad’s book on February 27, in a glowing review that features the author offering an “indictment of the West” for the Hamas-Israel war. Though the article does specify that the war began after Hamas began it with its bloody massacres, El Akkad’s lengthy denunciations of the West, and silence about Hamas, are left unchallenged.

El Akkad may well regard himself as an authority on Gaza without even referring to the other side. That is his right, but what is more remarkable is how these three publications, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and Toronto Life, seem to accept his unfounded statements and treat them as veritable truth, without seemingly any skepticism at all.