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American Entrepreneur Sees Hidden Strength in Islam

By Siraj Wahab
Arab News
Posted on Thursday September 28, 2006

JEDDAH, 27 September 2006 — The first time you meet Skip Conover, you are pleasantly surprised. In thobe, ghutra and igal, you might mistake him for an Arab. His comfort in this attire is the result in part of his 15 visits to the Kingdom. Conover, like all Americans, is frank and honest. He makes his points crystal clear and backs them up with solid facts. He describes himself as an entrepreneur. He founded and built two multifaceted international BPO (business process outsourcing) firms. He founded and built an international telecommunications and software development company in India. He has extensive worldwide business experience. He did his MBA from The Simon Graduate School of Business at The University of Rochester.

What he doesn’t mention is that he is primarily a humanist — a man inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Conover sees no difference among people of different religions. It is his love for humanity that prompts his disgust with what he calls inflammatory statements about Arabs and Muslims in the media. He has his own blog called tsunamiofblood.com. There he articulates his fears and apprehensions about the negative impact of American foreign policy. Starting in July 2005, Conover developed and produced “Words Matter,” a weekly public affairs television show in collaboration with Muzzammil Hassan, another Simon School graduate who is CEO of Bridges TV, a cable television channel for Muslim audiences in the United States.

Conover believes the concept of a nation-state is no longer relevant. “We all are on the same planet. And the planet is getting smaller and smaller. What is it that makes the United States the strongest economy and the strongest country in the world today? It is the country’s diversity. We have people from every country in the world, people of every religion… The beauty of that amalgam and the beauty of the way our government works is that we allow ideas to come from all groups. We have nearly 500 groups and what happens is that good ideas get adopted by everyone. And if bad ideas come from one group, the other 499 groups pound it down.”

He elaborated on his premise. “My example is Starbucks. Not only has it been adopted throughout the United States but around the world. I went to a hospital in Riyadh with four Starbucks cafes in one building. That is an example of a good idea. And the example of a bad idea is slavery. We had a very bad idea in the United States which was slavery. It took us 250 years to get rid of it. We had to fight a civil war, and kill 100,000 people to end slavery.”

Conover says America provides an environment where people can get their point across without resorting to violence. According to him, the two great examples of the credo of nonviolence are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Gandhi in India. “They simply refused to be violent, and they achieved their objectives. Although both of them were killed in violent ways, they still achieved their objectives, and they were very successful.”

He believes dissent is better than destruction. “Now people worry whether China will ever go to war with the United States. Well there is no chance of that. They have a $200 billion a year trade surplus with the United States. And so when they are paid in US dollars, they have to invest them somewhere. You can’t spend the US dollar in China. And so they end up putting their money into US treasury bills so the Chinese are one of the biggest investors in the United States. Then the Japanese, the Saudis, the Germans, the British, the French — all have huge investments in the United States so nobody is going to try to wipe out the United States.”

Conover says Muslims need to organize themselves and get out to vote in the coming American elections. “What is not well understood is that it was the Muslims who elected George W. Bush. The reason is very simple. The rest of us in America are evenly split between blue states and red states. We are just balanced approximately 50:50. The Muslims have at least a million votes in the United States. Those people, as I understand, voted entirely for Bush in 2000 because Al Gore had Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, as his running mate. Muslims just didn’t trust him because he was Jewish. They thought he would be in lockstep with Israel. Well, I have news for you. Every American politician is in lockstep with Israel — including Arab-American politicians. There are six members of the US Congress who are Arab-Americans, but when there was a vote on behalf of Israel in July during the Israel-Hezbollah war, the vote was unanimously passed. I don’t know whether they voted for the resolution, but I do know they didn’t vote against the resolution. Either they didn’t show up or they voted in favor or they abstained. But any of those means that they are under the thumb of the Jewish lobby. They are afraid to vote against because if they vote against, then the Jewish lobby will put a lot of money behind the candidate against them in their districts in the future. I have news for the Muslim community. All American politicians are in the pocket of the Jewish lobby today because they control a lot of money, and they spend a lot of money in politics.”

That does not explain the re-election of Bush, does it? “In 2004, a lot of Muslims had second thoughts. But even if 20 or 30 percent voted for Bush, it made a difference because 10 percent is 100,000 votes, and the president didn’t win by that many votes. So if Muslims had voted against this neocon agenda in 2004, we wouldn’t have Bush as president today. If the Muslims of America believe that they don’t want Bush to have a free hand for the next two years, then the Muslims of America need to get organized and make sure they get out to vote for Democrats for both the House and the Senate. We are electing the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate in this election. If one House of Congress goes Democratic, then Bush will have a speed bump. He has had a completely free hand in the last six years. If one House of Congress goes against him, then he is going to be slowed down.”

Conover says American Muslim voters need to mobilize and get the initiative under way. “I am hoping that we will get the message to American Muslims,” he said. “I know that some Muslim groups like the Arab-American Institute have ‘Register’ and ‘Vote’ campaigns but they are really word-of-mouth campaigns. Every Muslim in the Middle East who has a relative in the US should get the message across to their relatives. They need to make sure that all their friends vote against Bush. And if they do that by word of mouth, whether or not there is a good organizing group in the US, it will have an effect. The thing is minority groups often think that they do not have any power, but the truth is that because the rest of us are so evenly balanced, they have all the power. The vote has to come out in order for these elections to slow down the president.”

Conover worries that an unrestrained Bush administration will set its sights on Iran. “A lot of people speculate that the president has in mind attacking Iran, which I think would be a horrible idea,” he said. “If both Houses of Congress are still Republican, he knows it will be difficult to stop him, but if at least one House of Congress is against such a war then it will be a lot harder for him.”

He says there are common denominators that can serve as bridges for the people in the world. “At the human level there is no divide,” Conover said. “I think there have been some unscrupulous people in the world, both in the United States and in other countries who have misused information. They misused religion as well, but first of all they misused information. Obviously there are certain people in the Muslim world who misused Islam, but we can say the same about American Christian fundamentalists, the evangelicals.”

Conover says the American media should be a source of factual information about Muslims but instead the media opts to stereotype them and offers sensationalism instead of accurate reporting. “We have several million people so we have news media in the US that is constantly haranguing the public with incredibly inflammatory statements, and my perspective is that it is the first responsibility of the media to be responsible. The media should not be inflaming the news, and a lot of what you see on American talk shows is inflammatory. There are some people who believe the media has an agenda — the so-called neocons. The true neocons may not number more than 10 and I don’t know what their true agenda is.”

Still, Conover says we all have a lot in common. “All of us want to have families,” he said. “We want to have healthy families. We want to have children. We want to see our children prosper. We are not different at all. No matter where you go in the world, you will find these same ideas and desires.”