Finally, Something American Muslims and Jews can agree on: Stop the Hatred and Bigotry … Stop Trump!

Growing up in the US as a Muslim-American (not a term I had even heard or ever identified with until recently, since I’m not particularly religious – more on this in a later post), I had many Jewish-American friends and colleagues.  We usually got along great, and this translated into my professional career in Silicon Valley as well - at one point, for example, when I was running an outsourcing company with an office in Pakistan, we did work for a company started by a Jewish American, with an office in Israel.  If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it wasn’t - as everyone was professional and things generally went well. 

But like many American Muslims and Jews, I’ve found that there is one area where we almost always tended to disagree - and that was about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, namely, the policies of the Israeli government, the responses of the various Palestinian factions, settlements, etc.

Over time, the arguments about this intractable conflict, with its long history and everyone on both sides insisting they are “right”, went online and into social media.  Just as in the real world, I found that we rarely agreed on this issue either.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself on the same side of an argument with many of my Jewish friends recently, when I wrote about my fears of the cheering white Christian crowds supporting Trump’s ideas of racism and bigotry, and how it echoed Hitler’s rise to power and his party’s de-humanizing of the German Jews.  It is my contention that this de-humanizing was a necessary step before an atrocity like the Holocaust, or atrocities like slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing can occur.

 Like some of my Jewish friends pointed out, the analogy isn’t exact (i.e. Jews weren’t doing terrorist bombings in Germany, and no-one, not even those of us invoking the Hitler analogy, literally expect anything as terrible as another Holocaust to occur here in the US).  Still, I was surprised to find that many of my Muslim friends and many of my Jewish friends agreed and shared the same concerns about the rise of Trump and more importantly, about the unleashing of racism and bigotry that seemed to be simmering just below the surface, and exploited by Trump, could be extremely dangerous.

I wasn’t the only one who made this analogy - it’s become more and more common over the last month.  

For me, this echo started well before the current rise of Trump campaign.  Not only does it go back to his insistence that Obama isn’t a ‘real’ American and wasn’t qualified to be President because he wasn’t born in the US (even though no one doubts that he had a white American mother and a foreign father, just like Ted Cruz, who also had a white American mother and a foreign father, and who  was also not born in the US).  Though Trump led the birther movement against Obama, you don’t see him or his supporters saying a word about Ted Cruz’s birth certificate. What’s the difference between Obama and Cruz? Take a look.  Pretty clear that racism was playing a big role here.

 The echo got stronger with his sweeping anti-immigrant comments earlier this year (using the crimes of some immigrants as an excuse to generalize the hatred), and it really started to sting when he went against all Muslims after the San Bernardino and Paris terrorist attacks.  Each of these were making de-humanizing of an ethnic minority “respectable” amongst a group of people in this country who always had some racism under the surface.

 As I said, I’m not the only one making this analogy.

Recently, The New York Daily news put  a cartoon of Trump chopping off the head of the statue of liberty (see image here ) while they and invoking a new version of a famous quote from German pastor Martin Niemöller who spent seven years in a concentration camp because of his anti-Nazi veiws:  

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

In the Trump version, it was about Mexicans first and then Muslims.  Who’s next?

 Once a country goes down this path, things that seemed unthinkable even a few years ago are given serious consideration, such as labeling members of an entire ethnic group or an entire religion as “undesirables” who need to prove themselves as patriots or “real Americans”.

 Dana Milbank, from the Washington Post, wrote a column recently about the kind of racist and bigoted emails that Trump supporters have been sending him ever since he pointed out that Trump was bigoted and a racist.  “Trump brings bigots out of hiding”.   

 Dana Milbank isn’t Muslim.  He’s Jewish.  But when you tell people it’s OK to be hateful towards one religious or ethnic group, you pretty much tell them it’s OK to be hateful towards any other religious group of “foreigners”, even if they're American (because they're not "real" Americans according to the Trump supporter logic).

And once it becomes acceptable de-humanize an entire group (ethnic, religious or otherwise), any law or behavior that an angry majority wants to impose on the minority is acceptable and "lawful".

 It took this country more than a hundred years AFTER the civil war to get out of the hatred towards African Americans, and many of the Jim Crow laws in the south weren’t just directed at blacks – “No Blacks and Jews” was a very common sign.  Why? Because that’s what a vocal majority wanted.  The United States even turned away several ships of Jewish refugees form Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s because of xenophobia against jews and fears of "German Inflitraters", similar to the Syrian refugee fears that Trump and others are fanning.

 A number of mainstream Jewish groups have condemned Trump’s proposals.  According to forward.com: “The American Jewish Committee’s director of policy, Jason Isaacson, noted the timing of Trump’s statement, which called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” coincident with the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

“As Jews who are now observing Hanukkah, a holiday that celebrates a small religious minority’s right to live unmolested, we are deeply disturbed by the nativist racism inherent in the candidate’s latest remarks,” Isaacson said. “You don’t need to go back to the Hanukkah story to see the horrific results of religious persecution; religious stereotyping of this sort has been tried often, inevitably with disastrous results.”  Read more here . 

 Many in the world said, “Never Again”, after the extent of the German atrocities towards Jews and other “undesirable” groups was revealed.   

I’m not saying that Trump is as bad as Hitler was, but I’m saying that he’s opening the doors to racial hatred in a large group of angry people and making it OK to “de-humanize” minority groups, which his supporters are doing in droves.  

 Social media is serving to fuel the fire amongst this angry but vocal group, and his supporters are putting out ever more demeaning and de-humanizing posts first towards Hispanic immigrants and now towards Muslims and their faith.  I’ve even had to turn off my social media posts from many of my far-right friends because of so many hateful and racist posts they were sharing. When I try to call them out on it – they get angry and say “I’m not a racist – I’m sick of this crap.”  I’ve got an idea – if you want to stop being called a racist, stop putting racist and bigoted posts de-humanizing people that don’t look or worship like you do!

 Since we’re using a Nazi analogy, what do the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist and openly anti-semitic groups think of Trump?

 These groups were already super-excited when Trump was going after Hispanic immigrants, ranting about how  Trump’s critics were, according to Stormfront radio co-host Don Advo,  “are people living on the pieces of silver that they get from their Jewish paymasters so that they can preside over our extermination, our disposition, and our ultimate disappearance from the face of the earth.”.    Andrew Anglin, who edits the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, said that Trump’s opponents were simply  “Jewish groups are entirely obsessed with flooding America with brown people.”  Read more on buzzfeed. 

Once Trump announced his anti Muslim plan, the neo Nazis went from simply excited to doing orgiastic somersaults. Anglin for example, wrote, “Glorious Leader Calls for Complete Ban on All Moslems.”  Read more here on the Huffington Post  

Really?  Trump is now considered, at least in spirit, the Glorious Leader of the Neo Nazi White Supremicists?  Need I go on?

If ever there was a time for American Muslims and American Jews to put aside their differences it is now:  Let’s band together to stop the hate, and make sure this country, which we all love, doesn’t go down the slippery slope that others have gone before.

Our Fathers, Our Companies : Thoughts on Father's Day and Entrepreneurship

On this father’s day, I have been thinking about my own dad and his influence on my life and career as an entrepreneur.   In fact, the dedication I put onto the new edition of Zen Entrepreneurship, launched just last week, was:  “For my Dad, who brought us from the East, into the West”

My father was an immigrant from Pakistan, who packed up the family and brought us, back in the 1970’s, to the auto capital of the world, Detroit, where he hoped to put his economics background to good use.  From that time, he subtly and not-so-subtly encouraged us to think big, be ambitious, and even steered us towards tech entrepreneurship.

One Saturday in the early 1980’s, in the cold landscape of North Dakota, where we’d moved to because he couldn't find a decent job in Detroit during the recession,  he brought both us into his office. They had just bought an Apple II computer, and he wanted to show us that this would be the “next big thing”.  I still remember the first BASIC program that he taught us to write:

10 Print “Hello”

20 Goto 10

Well, after that I was hooked.  My brother and I competed to see who could build the better Tic Tac Toe games on the Apple II at my Dad's office after school.  Eventually we got our own Commodore 64 to program in.  The graphics were terrible – blocky lines that we used to draw X’s and O’s, but I remember my excitement when I figured out that I could have the computer play against a person (It didn’t occur to me until I saw WarGames with Mathew Broderick that you could have the computer play itself!).

My dad also brought out a copy of Time magazine that had a very young Steve Jobs on the cover with an apple on his head and showed it to us.  This was the only cover of Time that I remember him ever showing us (I just looked up the date – it was February 15, 1982), and the only cover of any magazine other than Mad that I remember from when I was kid.

Though my father wasn’t an entrepreneur himself, he always had an entrepreneurial mindset, and I think this had a lot to do with both my brother and I becoming entrepreneurs.   There was another side to this encouragement, of course - like most Asian parents that immigrated back then --  there were only a few “acceptable” professions for their kids: an engineer, lawyer, doctor, or entrepreneur. 

When I proudly announced that I was thinking of becoming an actor in high school, I remember him reprimanding me with some practical advice - if you want to be an actor, that's fine, but get an engineering degree so you can have a "real job" and make a living.  I listened (it turns out I was much better at computer programming than I was at acting!).  The funny thing is that my tech entrepreneurship eventually led me to be an angel investor in startups, which eventually led me to becoming a producer of independent films,  so it's call come back full circle.  

On this father’s day, I wonder what role encouragement from one’s dad (or mom, but we’ll talk about that on mother’s day!) plays in the (unconscious) decision to become an entrepreneur?

My co-founder in my very first (and most recent) company, Mitch Liu, had grown up with his dad running a small business in Seattle.  I also recall in my book that Mitch’s father had given us the funding so that we could afford to go to our first trade show, which launched our first product.

Years later, when I was at Stanford Business School, Steve Ballmer came to speak to to us.  He told us that Bill Gates had wanted Steve to leave business school to join Microsoft full-time. Steve’s own father wasn’t so sure since the company was just a fledliging startup at the time.  When Steve hesitated, Bill brought out the big guns to convince him that Microsoft was an opportunity that Steve couldn't pass up: Bill’s father.  According to Steve, whenever there was a serious negotiation in those early days and someone needed convincing, Bill would make them have dinner with his father, which would usually do the trick!

One of Bill Gates' neighbors, Naveen Jain, whom I met recently, co founder of Intellius and Moon Express, wrote a nice piece about his children becoming entrepreneurs at a very young age on Forbes:   http://www.forbes.com/sites/naveenjain/2012/06/17/the-source-of-my-greatest-happiness-have-always-been-our-children/

If their father hadn’t been such a successful entrepreneur and such an influence on them, I wonder if would they have become so entrepreneurial at such an early age?

Scott Walker, himself founder of Walker Law Group, tells us a cautionary taleabout his own father, who had started and took a telecommunications company public, making milions, and then losing them in a great read on this father's day: “3 Lessons for entrepreneurs on Father’s day”: http://blog.asmartbear.com/three-entrepreneur-lessons.html

As I think about it today, while I don’t believe that genetics has anything to do with it, I can say that most of the people that I know who’ve become entrepreneurs had some serious influence come down from their fathers.  So, on this Father’s day, as we appreciate our Dad’s, let’s also think about the influence we are having on the next generation - it could be a key factor in what direction they end up going down in their own path in life.