A few photos from the Palm Beach Gardens (Florida) Barnes & Noble…
The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:
A book for ICE employees tasked with picking MS-13 members out of the crowd of 30+ million undocumented Americans:
A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S. and return to Egypt (he says that he wants to help Gazans, bombarded for no reason and through no fault of their own (according to the book jacket), but won’t go back to his native Egypt and cut some holes in the border fence to help his Gazan brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters escape?).
Paraphrasing García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one could say that “El Akkad left his previous home in search of a land that no one had ever promised him.”
“much of what the West promises is a lie”
I don’t feel betrayed by “the West” (I didn’t choose to be born into it), and I wonder what exactly the “West” promised El Akkad that turned out to be a lie.
> A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S.
Hahaha! A few of points:
1. One can always see things better with contrast. I have observed many times that the British and Americans have a better understanding of many aspects of India (old and new) because they see it through a ‘Western’ (philosophically different) lens. There’s some quote by Schopenhauer to the effect that, in order to understand something, you need to be completely detached from it, which explains this phenomenon to some extent. The writer may have understood the West and Egypt with a certain amount of detachment and might have something interesting to say as a result.
2. I don’t think he would have had the time, energy, or infrastructure to write the book and profit from it if he were in Egypt. Most likely, he might not have been able to do anything substantial for the Gazans from Egypt. So, he is thanking the West implicitly via this book. There’s a “word-action delta,” as I call it, associated with the theme of the book and the author’s actions, which deserves some criticism, I agree. However, in many cultures, you only criticize people you love or are attached to, because they might listen to you and change. Otherwise, you just try to ignore them. So there’s a certain level of affection he might be showing toward the West via the book.
3. It’s not easy to comfortably live in many countries while criticizing them. The writer is implicitly praising the West with his actions. I don’t thinking in many countries creating even SNL type sketches of their politicians in power would not get the creators in trouble.
4. Personally, I don’t think the real cause of problems is ‘privilege’ like what this book’s blurb proposes. Most of the present Eastern societies are very hierachical (both in how they think about different ideas and the organization of the socities), and this ‘privilege’ is probably as much present there if not more due to the hierarchy.
> The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:
Just like the contemporary definition of ‘autonomy’, the contemporary idea of the ‘self’ fails to capture a lot of things, IMO. If one is constantly and deeply affected by the people close to oneself in form of family and friends, the surrounding nature, etc., and any changes to the surroundings changes the ‘self’, how can you define self using the contemporary definition? A very social person with a huge family may have a different notion of self than a monk living in a hut in the forest.
Just being pedantic here, but according to Wikipedia it’s Canada he won’t leave, not the USA.
Regardless, I think the author is counting on the large population of Westerners who simply cannot get enough of being told how awful they, their countries, and their civilization are; while there may be a similarly receptive audience back in Cairo — where I’m sure he’d much prefer to be, poor man — I doubt the book business there would be as lucrative.
Wokipedia seems to be out of date. The author previously enriched Canada and is now enriching Portland, Oregon. The noble migrant is profiled in https://www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-culture/2025/02/omar-el-akkad-against-this-book-review and says “A Portland resident for the past decade, El Akkad grew up in both Arab and Western cultures, in Egypt and Qatar, then Canada and the US.”
Actually, if you keep reading in Wokipedia it says “He lives with his wife and children in Portland, Oregon.”
I’m genuinely trying to understand, and perhaps someone can help me make sense of this.
We hear daily about the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza: shortages of clean water, food, healthcare, and reports of widespread suffering, starvation and famine from organizations like the WHO, UNRWA, and the UN, echoed by the media and humanitarian advocates. The situation is described as catastrophic, but yet about 130 children are born daily in Gaza [1].
Given the immense hardship and instability, I find it difficult to wrap around my head how Gazans are able to think about and have sex to make babies. Is sex the only thing Gazans think about? I’m not dismissing the suffering, my question is about trying to understand the mindset of Gazans.
[1] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born-daily-gaza-amid-total-siege-aid-and-goods
The latest stat from the UN is that there are 60,000 women pregnant in Gaza at any given time. At nine months for a pregnancy, that’s about 220 new potential fighters born every day.
Note that “women” would include pre-teens and teens because Gazan females may marry as young as 12.
The stat was 50,000 pregnant women at the beginning of the glorious attack on the Zionist entity. It was up to 60,000 a year ago according to https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/world/middleeast/gaza-malnutrition-hunger-pregnant-women.html so it is perhaps 70,000 pregnant women right now.
My favorite part of this is the childless American, a biological failure, considers him/her/zir/themself to be smart while paying taxes so that his/her/zir/their Gazan counterpart can have 8 kids and never work.
https://1943.pl/en/artykul/children/
“Between the autumn of 1940 and July 1942, approximately 230 children were born in the Warsaw Ghetto on average per month (at the same time, the death rate was estimated at around 2,535 people per month).”
They’re all normal people, all victims of all genocides have always been normal people.
Anon, there is a difference between 220 per day and 230 per month (less then 8 per day or about 32 per day population size adjusted), an order of magnitude difference. Also tell me about Warsaw Ghetto artillery and rocket fire on Warsaw or German civilians and about murderous genocide attempt by said ghetto.
The book title of the Egyptian sufferer of the West seems more of a threat then of a statement.
I still can’t get over how they did a pogrom on a peace rave. Will the Gazans ever tire of violence?
Well, there is a theory that peace rave visitors are ideal victims, because both involved parties consider kind of people that go to the rave parties to be subhuman. One party wants Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile, and other party (funded by the first party) wants to spread Islam over the whole world (“from the river to the sea” being just an excuse). Both parties also agree that they definitely do not want the two-state solution.
@ mata (hope that not mata hari) Yours is the wokest comment of the week on this blog. Full of made up facts and fake moral equivalency.