This article was originally published on The Palestine Chronicle
A little over a month after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, which claimed more than 1,000 Israeli lives last year, Jewish-English actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen accused TikTok and its participants of “creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.”
Whereas he insisted the platform was to blame for spreading misinformation about people of his ethnicity, it has in fact been one of the most effective resources for documenting and transmitting the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian (and now Lebanese) civilians in the aftermath of the aforementioned attack.
Today, the death toll in Gaza continues to rise upward of 40,000.
Back in 2021, amid the escalating violence over Palestinian evictions in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, he tweeted: “The surge in antisemitism on the streets is fueled by antisemitism on social media (…) Twitter – Why do you allow #HitlerWasRight ?! Those who celebrate the Holocaust aim to perpetuate another.”
What he failed to address was that over 256 Palestinians were killed during the conflict, 66 of whom were children, while thousands were left injured.
Criticizing major players in the media space for invigorating lies is necessary, except the 53-year-old funnyman hadn’t a leg to stand on in making the above claims. There remains a blinding irony to his perturbed comments considering he established himself in the entertainment circuit by fudging Arabs and Muslims while foisting his antics off as harmless jokes during a phase when Islamophobia was (and still is) proliferating with no end in sight.
By the mid-2000s, Cohen was starting to find immense success as Borat Sagdiyev, a deeply humiliating caricature of Kazakhstani folk that depicts them as incestuous and sexist antisemites with an insouciance toward rape. What’s most worrisome about the shtick, however, is the number of people whose impression of the country is still limited to this mischaracterization.
In late October, just as vote centers for the 2024 presidential elections began opening up across the United States, he reprised the character on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon while addressing the Democratic and Republican candidates.
“Mr. (Donald) Trump, you say in Ohio people eat the cats and the dogs,” he began, with the host adlibbing snickers between each sentence. “Which restaurant do they serve them at? Can you get me (a) reservation please? In my country, we have KFC: Kazakh Fried Cat. It’s pussy licking good!”
About Kamala Harris, he added: “You are a woman, a person of color and married to a Jew. I advise you not to come to Kazakhstan. You have already made three out of four crimes punishable by death.”
Borat is a problem for the same reasons as Apu from The Simpsons — his farcical behavior and outlook is written off as a satire on American attitudes, creating a purported balance that obscures the Western tradition of painting the Other as unrefined and backward for laughs.
Whereas Apu wasn’t deemed offensive at first given the lack of South Asian representation in the 90s, the frugal convenience store owner and his catchphrase “Thank you, come again” has now become not only the most common Indian stereotype but also a widely acceptable one. Hence, the voice actor behind the inflated accent stepped down from the role in 2020.
Cohen, on the other hand, teamed up with Amazon Studios that same year on a multi-million-dollar sequel to his blockbuster Borat film from 2006. Just like the original, the scenes set in Kazakhstan were shot in a Romanian village and the “Kazakhstanis” were in fact Romanians. After all, it’s tough to believe that any self-respecting Kazakhs would partake in such a revolting portrayal of their culture for the same reasons White folk had to paint their faces to degrade the Black community with complete flexibility.
Treating every culture besides his own like a costume is central to Cohen’s widespread allure. Take, for instance, his Orientalist extravaganza The Dictator, which portrays Arabs and Muslims as brutish, sex-obsessed misogynists in the form of East African despot Admiral General Aladeen and his orbit. Sure enough, the character’s fixation on destroying Israel is rolled out in conjunction with his hatred of Jewish people, which he is never able to fully conquer even as he comes just inches away from redeeming himself toward the end of the movie. Then, of course, there is the animated lemur King Julien from the Madagascar films. Whereas this part only features his voice, it is still unclear why he chose to go with an Apuesque Indian accent for an animal native to southeast Africa — perhaps misrepresentation is just part of the services he offers.
Contrarily, the actor and writer also played an Israeli anti-terror expert Erran Morad on his Who Is America? series in 2018. Prejudiced and blithe, the heedless tyrant talks about developing a technique to weed out the enemy from civilians by sliding smartphone cameras under burqas. The catch, unsurprisingly, is that he never served the Zionist state in an official capacity, and so he is made out to be an embodiment of everything the Mossad isn’t.
Given the Cambridge alum’s critically acclaimed portrayal of Eli Cohen (who he has likened himself to) in The Spy, it makes sense why he has never ridiculed the intelligence agency’s unethical practices — that and his admiration for government officials such as former prime minister Shimon Peres, who was directly involved in the 1940s ethnic cleansing of Palestine that came to be known as the Nakba.
For decades, Cohen has been serving up his one-dimensional impression of the world with a shameless entitlement to lenient grading. Yet, he is particularly sensitive when it comes to his own Jewish identity, which he continues to hide behind while smearing other cultures. Quite craftily, he has played several antisemitic characters throughout his career to create the illusion of making fun of his own while reinvigorating stereotypes that allow him more freedom to persist in his nearsighted, racist comedy.
In one of his early sketches, for example, Borat starts a singalong at an American country bar with the lyrics: “Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns, then we have [a] big party.” In a similar spirit, the Academy Award nominee was sued for $110 million after interviewing a grocer named Ayman Abu Aita from the Israeli-occupied West Bank for his 2009 mockumentary Brüno. Ultimately settled under undisclosed terms, the lawsuit alleged that the subject was falsely portrayed as a terrorist through manipulative editing despite being promised that his activism for Palestinian rights would be the feature’s main focus.
What the film didn’t properly show was how the title character, a gay fashion journalist from Austria, had a near-death experience in Jerusalem after coming very close to being stoned by Hasidic Jews for donning a provocative twist on their traditional outfit.
Cohen often paints an overdramatized picture of Arab and Muslim antisemitism, likening it to white supremacy and creating a false proximity between the two that belies the crux of Islamophobia. This notion alone has allowed even the most “progressive” political forces of the West to continue tormenting the Middle East with little to no accountability.
Constructing a joke around a subject isn’t the same as positioning it at the center and imposing humor on it. Skilled comedians know how to locate hilarity on the edge of serious issues without saying that it in itself is funny — the failure (or refusal) to make this distinction has made Sacha Baron Cohen’s facetious brand far more dangerous than amusing as racial and cultural tensions continue to reach new heights.
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