The tech giant raises a glass in a birthday salute to a woman that celebrated Osama bin Laden and called for the Death of America
By Mark Cromer
For the tens of millions of Americans that ‘Googled’ anything on Thursday, if they spent more than a nanosecond considering the illustration that adorned its search page, they were greeted by a warm-toned, well-drawn image by artist Alyssa Winans that depicted a young Asian woman adorned in a red head-wrap and sporting Catwoman glasses speaking into a hand-held microphone and backed by multicolored picket signs that spelled out ‘Equality’ with a nondescript cityscape in the distance.
Just how many Americans—the ‘Google Doodle’ only appeared on the screens of users in the United States—paused to wonder what cool chick the search engine giant was celebrating and why is unknown (except perhaps to Google and the National Security Agency), but it’s likely that it was little more than a pleasant flash across the screen for the vast majority of them.
Such was the silent explosion of Google, Inc.’s, Yuri Kochiyama bomb, which was likely intended as more of a digital propaganda Neutron warhead, one designed to result in a considerably lower blast radius while still widely delivering its poisonous radiation far and wide.
For those who did take a few moments to click on the illustration for a little more information, they discovered it was seemingly nothing more than Google’s ‘happy birthday’ wishes for the late American activist Kochiyama, with the tech company declaring “It’s with great pleasure that Google celebrates Yuri Kochiyama, an Asian American activist who dedicated her life to the fight for human rights and against racism and injustice.”
Sounds good, right? Any decent American, indeed any rational person of any national persuasion on this planet, would think ‘Right on sister, and good on you Google.’
Unfortunately, the devil is in Kochiyama’s details.
Google’s birthday card offered only a select few details, notably Kochiyama’s tragic experience of being carted off as a 20-year-old woman with the rest of her family and more than 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent to the internment camps the United States established during the existential threat of World War II. As Google inscribed on its digital card “Kochiyama left a legacy of advocacy: for peace, U.S. political prisoners, nuclear disarmament, and reparations for Japanese Americans interned during the war. She was known for her tireless intensity and compassion, and remained committed to speaking out, consciousness-raising, and taking action until her death in 2014.”
Yet specifically what Kochiyama spent most of her adult life tirelessly and intensely advocating for was left off Google’s birthday salute. And that was not an accidental omission on a card written in joyous haste, and for understandable reasons.
Ironically, Goggle clearly counted on the likelihood that very few people would, well, ‘Google’ Kochiyama to learn more about her and her lifetime of “speaking out.”
And apparently Google bet right. Even NBC News ran a story yesterday by reporter Traci G. Lee on its website headlined ‘Google Honors Activist Yuri Kochiyama On Her 95th Birthday’ that highlighted little more than her brief friendship with Malcom X (she was actually with Malcom when he was assassinated onstage at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1965) but was filled with the now required screenshots of random Twitter salutes, in lieu of actually writing something at length and of note.
But those precious few people who took the time to indulge even a cursory review of Kochiyama’s public record of ‘activism’ surely discovered something much more about her than the Hallmark-like prose Goggle offered in tribute.
They learned that Kochiyama was a joyous supporter of Osama bin Laden and in an interview with an alternative news outlet published just two years after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on America on September 11, 2001, that left more than 3,000 Americans dead she hailed the terrorist as a freedom fighter that had struck a righteous blow against the world’s enemy.
“I am glad you are curious why I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people I admire,” Kochiyama said during an interview with Los Angeles Indymedia that was published on October 17, 2003. “To me, he is in the category of Malcom X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire. They had much in common. Besides being strong leaders who brought consciousness to their people, they all had a severe dislike for the U.S. government and those who held power in the U.S. I think all of them felt the U.S. government and its spokesmen were all arrogant, racist, hypocritical, self-righteous and power hungry.”
Gleefully singing in the ashen rain of New York’s terror, Kochiyama went further still.
“I do not care what the U.S. government or Americans feel…I thank Islam for bin Laden.”
While her assessment of the United States government’s penchant for arrogance, hypocrisy and insatiable hunger for power, at least in general terms, is actually shared by tens of millions of patriotic Americans today across the political spectrum and perhaps most notably among the core base of supporters of both Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, Kochiyama’s burning hatred for America as both a nation and as a unified people is not lost in translation. Her interview danced on the mass gravesites in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and it followed her long and active association with murderous radical splinter groups from the American Left that festered across the body Americana from the late 1960s into the early 1980s, including the self-declared ‘Black Liberation Army’ that executed police officers and gunned down security guards during the robberies across the country that funded their deluded fantasies of a revolution that went no further than the various basements they called headquarters.
Evidently understanding that revolution in America was last successfully undertaken by a band of white men two centuries earlier, Kochiyama decided to break bread with her heroes abroad, including such notable bastions of freedom as Castro’s prison-island paradise in Cuba and the ‘The Shining Path,’ that brigade of freedom-loving Maoists waging nonstop terror attacks in Peru.
Throughout her long jihad against Western civilization in general and America in particular, along the way Kochiyama became disenchanted with her fellow Asian Americans, most of whom she felt had essentially been freeze-dried into cheap Anglo knock-offs that were filled with respect for a Western culture that should be instinctively reviled. But Kochiyama kept her own shining path ideologically pure as it led her down many an alley illuminated with such leftwing racialist icons as the cold-blooded street thug-turned-killer Wesley Cook, who was crowned ‘Mumia Abu-Jamal’ after he murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Few things spoke to Kochiyama’s revolutionary heart than gunning down a white police officer on the street.
As Kochiyama said clearly, repeatedly and on the record well over a half-century; white supremacy as embodied in a nation-state called America was the enemy. No commas, no caveats, period.
Given her perspective, perhaps then it is understandable that little can be found of Kochiyama expressing revulsion or even a whiff of concern about the wanton slaughter unleashed by Imperial Japan throughout Asia in the 1930s and into the global conflagration of World War II that raged through the mid-1940s. She didn’t have much to offer about a Japan ruled in the 20th Century by an emperor worshipped as a literal living god that marched his armies into China, where they slaughtered 300,000 civilians alone in the ‘Rape of Nanking,’ to say nothing of the half-million Korean women that were enslaved and systematically raped as war-brides dubbed ‘comfort women’ by the Japanese Imperial Army. Both are historical capital crimes—and only two on a lengthy list throughout Asia, from the Philippines to Burma—which Japan today still offers little more than a shrug as they mutter the diplomatic version of ‘We’re sorry you feel that way.’
Kochiyama’s effective silence on the horrors committed by Japan during the conflict in which her hatred for America was born is even more surprising considering her deep affinity for ‘Chairman’ Mao Zedong, whose forced marches, great leaps forward and spring purges killed tens of millions of his own people. By Kochiyama’s standards, Pol Pot must have appeared like a well-intentioned failure.
Google’s decision to light the fuses, er, candles, on Kochiyama’s posthumous birthday cake and send it out to a nation that she so proudly hated was rich Devil’s food indeed, as it celebrated a woman whose Maoist revolutionary vision, were it to come to fruition, would lead to the arrest and summary execution of Google’s entire executive staff and the relocation of its shareholders to ‘re-education’ camps where graduation commencement would be held in front of freshly dug trenches, cameras rolling.
And Google’s birthday card to Kochiyama comes at an interesting time in America.
Next week, President Obama, who successfully oversaw the mission to put a bullet (or 50) into the head of Kochiyama’s divine hero Osama bin Laden, will pay a visit to Hiroshima, the Japanese city that America literally wiped off the map on August 6, 1945, with an atomic ‘Dear Hirohito’ letter delivered via airmail. The first American president to do so, Obama has come under intense criticism from some quarters for deciding to travel to the city, but he is right to make the trip. Acknowledging a defeated former enemy’s pain is an act of humanity, not one of apology. It’s a gesture not only from a smart victor, but a compassionate move suitably far enough removed from the fight to be offered now.
And an actual apology from Obama wouldn’t be so terrible either, as long as he offered it along the lines of something like this: “America regrets that a terrible world war was triggered by the forces of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and that it consumed the lives of more than 60 million people around the globe—the vast majority of them civilians in Allied nations— and that it had to come to such a terrifying end that killed so many civilians here in Hiroshima and then in Nagasaki amid flashes that heralded the bright midnight of the Nuclear Age. America is indeed sorry that it came to that, and she prays that she never again has to rain nuclear annihilation on those trying to kill her. America hopes that you will join her in that prayer.”
But before Obama even leaves town next week for Nippon, Google’s rival Facebook has come under surprising heat for allegedly monkeying with its algorithms to ensure conservative news sources stay at the back of the trending bus. In response, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg caught critics by surprise when he requested a meeting with leading conservatives across the nation to talk, explain his thoughts about the issue and to listen to their concerns. In an era when the American academy is now largely defined by Kochiyama’s Millennial cadres running around campus demanding students drop their heads, raise their fists and robotically pledge a loyalty oath to the cause of ‘social justice’ that is rooted in blank-eyed acceptance of the pre-screened Group Think puree being spooned to them with the universities institutional gun tucked under their chins, Zuckerberg’s smart and hopefully sincere gesture must have Kuochiyama rolling over in her grave or spinning in her ceremonial Symbionese Liberation Army urn.
It has been a strange week.
Google celebrated a woman whose life was spent working toward the destruction of America even as Facebook’s own dear leader seemingly opened his door and his mind to people Kochiyama dreamed of seeing shot.
As the old saying goes: Only in America.
[Note to Google: America’s poet laureate Charles Manson will be celebrating his 82nd birthday this November 12th. In honor of such, a ‘Google Doodle’ of Charlie strumming a guitar amidst a dusty western movie ranch, surrounded by college students with signs that spell ‘Peace & Love’ seems in order for your company. A birthday card with an inscription that reads: “Charles Milles Manson, the inspiring motivational speaker that has spent his life as a musician-turned-performance artist who remained undeterred by the oppressive Prison-Industrial Complex and, worse, songwriting betrayals by The Beach Boys, he is a stoic reminder to us all of what can be accomplished with a VW Minibus, a handful of hits of decent acid, a small group of true believers (mostly chicks) and a few knives. ‘Manson’ to most, forever to us just ‘Charlie.’ He captivated a nation.” Just a suggestion.]
