| Luai Ahmed | |
| Birth Date: | 5 September 1993 |
| Birth Place: | Sanaa, Yemen |
| Occupation: | Journalist, columnist and influencer |
| Nationality: | Swedish |
Luai Ahmed (in Arabic لؤي أحمد; born September 5, 1993) is a Swedish journalist, columnist and influencer, born in Yemen. Ahmed is active on social media and is considered as a controversial critic of the radical Islam and the anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel inherent in it.[1] Ahmed is openly gay and considers himself Zionist.[2] [3]
Ahmed was raised in the capital of Yemen, Sana'a. He grew up in his home on the values instilled in him by his mother, Amal Basha, a peace and women's rights activist and winner of several honors, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto.[4]
Following his mother's feminist activism, the Al-Qaeda organization threatened his family in 2013[5] [6] [7] asking in an open letter to the population in Yemen to receive the address where the family lived.
In 2014 Luai Ahmed got an opportunity to hold a lecture at the invitation of the "Olof Palme Foundation" in Sweden. His family members urged him to seek asylum there. He came to Halmstad and since then and for the next four years, he lived there. He asked for and received political asylum, and later also Swedish citizenship.[8] After that he lived in Malmö and in Stockholm. He became a member of the political party Sweden Democrats.[9]
Ahmed is active on social networks: mainly on Twitter,[10] with 144,000 followers, and 65,000 on TikTok, his videos getting hundreds of thousands of views on average. During October 2023, his videos became "viral" on the network, and only in the months of October and November 2023, about 100 thousand followers were added to him.[11] He condemns what he says is the hypocrisy of the Middle East, the hatred of Jews that is instilled from a young age,[12] the servitude to religion and the Muslim world's delay in social and technological progress.
In addition, he is a columnist for the conservative Swedish newspaper Bulletin, where he writes articles against anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews as well as articles in which Islam, integration and immigration policy are recurring topics. In Yemen he wrote for the newspapers Yemen Today, the Yemen Times and the youth magazine YoO. According to him, he does not agree with the concept of Islamophobia,[13] because phobia (according to him) expresses an extremely irrational and exaggerated fear. Atheists are not "phobic" because the fear of prison or the death penalty in Muslim societies is a very rational and tangible fear. Homosexuals' fear of prison or the death penalty in Muslim societies is palpable and rational. The fear of liberals, and especially free women in Islamic societies, of prison or the death penalty, is a rational and legitimate fear – so Ahmed said in an interview with the liberal newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
In 2021, he published his book "A Paradoxical Journey of a Refugee from the Sharia of Yemen to the Rainbow in Sweden", which tells about his first five years in Sweden, with a humorous critique of extreme Islam, but also of Sweden, where he currently lives.
Ahmed visited Israel in November 2023 during the war with Hamas, and his impressions of his visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, which according to him the fact that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter, is actually apartheid, he spread on the network.[14] [15]
Ahmed has a bachelor's degree in international business studies from the Lebanese International University in Yemen. He also studied International Migration and Ethnic Relations at the University of Malmö.