Luai Ahmed, a Yemeni journalist, author and content creator who has been living in Sweden since 2014, gave an impressive keynote address at the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium. In his speech, he described his journey from hating Israel to fighting anti-Semitism and how to defend democracy on social media. He has since become a fierce critic of radical Islam and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The article has also been published on ZEIT Online.
My name is Luai Ahmed. I am a 31-year-old journalist and content creator from Sana’a, the capital city of Yemen. Today, I use my platform on social media to fight Islamic extremism, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and sexism.
I am a part of an online movement called “Builders of the Middle East”. We have a channel in English, where I am a host, a channel in Arabic, and one in Hebrew. These channels are built to tell stories of humanity, and of human beings. Our team is made up of Arabs and Jews who are tired of extremism, violence and hatred, and we are doing everything in our power to deradicalize the Middle East.
Today, I have Jewish co-workers who I deeply love. I have Jewish friends who mean the world to me. But that wasn’t always the case.
I used to hate Jews. In fact, I didn’t believe in the Holocaust. I believed in the eradication of Israel. I was homophobic, even though I myself was in the closet. And I believed that the entire world hated Islam and Muslims, and that as a Muslim, I should make sure that the whole world becomes Muslim.
These extremist ideas, instilled in me as a child for the first two decades of my life in Yemen, are the very ideas that I fight against today.
My own deradicalization took around 10 years, and it happened in Sweden. It is a very long story, but I will try to make it short: As a Yemeni Muslim, I absorbed Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism from an early age in Sana’a, where I was born and where I lived for twenty years. Islam was my first religion, and Palestine was my second. Against my will, I was brainwashed to hate Jews and to deny and belittle the Holocaust.
As a child, I would repeat after the imam in my local mosque during Friday prayers. He would say: “May God destroy the Jews.” I would reply: “ameen,” along with the thousands of Muslims sitting and praying next me.
He would say: “May God destroy Israel.” I would reply: “ameen.”
In a totalitarian society like Yemen, where blasphemy and apostasy were punishable by death, the belief in Israel’s eradication was mandatory.
As a teenager, I wore the Palestinian keffiyeh with pride. I remember even wanting to get a tattoo of Handala – the cartoon boy who has come to symbolize the Palestinian struggle – on my shoulder, despite tattoos being impermissible in Islam. Such were my convictions and feelings for Palestine.
On a religious level, I was taught in school that the Jews betrayed the Prophet Muhammad and tried to kill him. For 12 years, I studied Islam and the life of the Prophet, and a significant part of that was about the Jews. One of the stories I was taught held that today’s Jews are descended from monkeys. Allah had supposedly transformed them into monkeys because of their filthy nature and their attempts to kill our greatest leader, the Prophet Muhammad.
On a societal level, I learned that “the Jews control the world.” My friends and I binge-watched the nine-hour conspiracy documentary “The Arrivals,” which claimed that the music industry, film industry, pharmaceutical industry and all other industries are dominated by “the evil Zionist Jews” in order to control and subdue Muslims and Arabs. According to this documentary, 9/11 was orchestrated by the Jews, who were allegedly pursuing a plan to destabilize the world and start wars because Jews were said to enjoy seeing Arab blood spilled.
This was my childhood.
In 2014, I fled from Yemen to Sweden because of my sexual orientation, and yet my contempt for and prejudices against Jews and Israelis were as unshakable as a 20-year-old building with a strong and solid foundation. And it took about 10 years for this building to collapse.
In 2016, after two years of living in Sweden, I moved into accommodations at Halmstad University. And a newly arrived exchange student with dark hair also moved in. I was intrigued, finally someone in my residence hall who wasn’t blond and blue-eyed.
“Hi, my name is Luai, what’s your name?” I asked him.
“Tal,” he replied, a warm smile on his lips. “I’m from Israel.” As soon as the word Israel escaped from his mouth, I went into fight-or-flight mode. Suddenly, I couldn’t see or hear anything. My vision became blurry, I felt dizzy. I basically went into total shock.
The world spun when I finally encountered “the evil Jew,” whom I believed was behind my people’s misery, who thirsted for my blood, who wished me harm, who orchestrated 9/11 and blamed the Arabs, and who were actively destroying the world.
A few seconds later, when I recovered from the shock, I realized that Tal was babbling on about how much he loved Yemeni food and culture. On the kitchen counter, he had laid out his Yemeni spices that he brought with him from Israel. “Look! I’m going to make the best Yemeni jachnun bread for you! My Yemeni friends taught me how to make the best jachnun!” he promised. “You should use these spices if you want!”
In the beginning, I didn’t believe him. I thought it was an evil plan.
Six months later, Tal became my favorite person in the residence hall, and his “evil plan” turned out to be a kind-hearted gesture. He just wanted to make Yemeni food for me and genuinely get to know a Yemeni Muslim for the first time. That friendship was the beginning of a life-changing journey that I can barely describe with words.
Seven years later, October 7 happened. When I went online and learned of the massacre, I was shocked. Angry. Incredulous. I thought to myself: “This could have been Tal.” This could have been my friends who were slaughtered.
But worst of all, had it not been for Sweden opening my eyes to humanity, I could have been Hamas. I would have justified their genocide. I would have cheered for them. I would have gone onto the streets and screamed “gas the Jews” in Malmö, alongside other protesters.
And then I saw my friends and family celebrating the massacre. It struck me deeply. I couldn’t believe the dehumanization of the Jewish people. But then again, I did believe it. After all, I was taught to be Hamas in Yemen.
Seeing the celebrations of the massacre of the Jewish people, seeing my friends and family members cheering, sent me back to the 1930s. And I began to understand how deep are the roots of hatred towards the Jewish people.
And then I visited Israel, which was another cathartic experience. I finally got to see and experience the Jewish state I had been taught to hate. Today, Israel is one of my favorite countries in the world to be in. It makes me feel like home. As I often say: It’s a carbon copy of Yemen … but with human rights.
Today, I work with both Arabs and Jews. We create thoughtful content to combat the extremism we see online – the narratives that whitewash the Islamic regime occupying Iran, Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah and other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations aiming to destroy Israel and destabilize the West. One of the main strategies these terrorist organizations pursue is twisting the truth and dehumanizing the free West.
The content that we create at Builders is extremely diverse. We tell stories of Jews who learned Arabic to communicate with Arabs. Arab and Jewish students who go to the same schools and learn about each other’s cultures, histories and pains. We tell stories about Arab Muslim drag queens who have been threatened with death by their families – and who had to flee so they could be themselves.
We combat extremism by presenting a third narrative. Not the “Israeli side that dehumanizes Arabs and Palestinians.” And not the “Arab side that dehumanizes Israel and Jews.”
We show human stories and perspectives of unity and coexistence. Because while there are people protesting for destruction and hatred, we protest against destruction and hatred by showing Arabs and Jews coexisting.
I truly believe that if I was able to make the shift from wanting to eradicate Israel and Jews, to working with Jews to create a better and more peaceful Middle East, then so can the rest of the Arab and Muslim world.
The deep lack of harmony and co-existence between Jews and Muslims can also be seen on the streets and in the politics of Europe. We see so much anger and so many screeching roars of violence on our beautiful European streets due to the radicalization of the mosques and schools in the Middle East.
I dream of a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, which I believe would calm down the situation. To achieve that dream, we have a lot of deradicalization work to do. The extremist political Islamist ideology has sunk its teeth deep into my country of Yemen and destroyed it – and it is the same poison that has also sowed extremist terrorist ideologies all around the Middle East. And, yes, even in the free West.
The Op-Ed is an edited version of a speech given by Luai Ahmed at the international conference on media and democracy M100 Sanssouci Colloquium on 12 September 2024 in Potsdam.
Photo: M100/Ulf Büschleb
