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1. 1 Petronius says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 9:40 am

   My wife is from Kazakhstan, and the anti Semitism that they have is the old fashioned Russian kind, and not because it is “Muslim” as Baron Cohen assumes. Kazakhstan is only 47% muslim and other muslims in the region call them muslims by name, it’s pretty obvious what they mean by that, but to Cohen all Muslims are the same, right?

   The anti-Semitism found there is not as bad as the kind that he found in the US, which is a protestant kind rather than the kind ascribed to the dread or to Kazakhs, if only Cohen bothered to find out about. Baron Cohen’s family comes from the old Russian Empire, and they have done rather “well” over here,m but I find Bort to be Islamaphobic in it’s conception, with the assumption that all muslims are anti semitic, when this is not the case with Kazakhs, they do not mention Palestine or any kind of solidarity with other Muslim countries, they only say things like crafty like a jew, which is rather like what I hear people over here say regarding tightness and so on.

   We have to ask ourselves that using the philosophical device of the parody and see if the joke/”Humour” (sic) has any integrity; so what if I were to dress in a prayer shawl, put a little frisbee on my head and pretend to be an Islamaphobic Israeli presenter making racist comments against Muslims all the time and see if the joke was so funny? Would it be? This is rhetorical, obviously it would not be and there would be an outcry.

   All the while Baron Cohen pretends that he is exposing anti-Semitism wherever he goes, but did he find any in the UK? No, the original joke had more integrity, it was about how we did not know anything about a place like Kazakhstan so we accepted the strange behaviour, or even better chimed in with his sexism like the Oxford Don did. By coincidence when he went to the US after over exposure in the UK that he found a rich vein of Anti Semitism to exploit. So this zealous campaign to expose anti-semitism is all a bit a-posteriori his own Islamaphobic assumptions and acts as a nice justification. But not to me it doesn’t.

   Ali G’s uncle is called Jamal, apart from Ali being an Ali, interesting that, another Muslim character, what a coincidence! So I guess then that it’s ok to defame an entire nation using their flag and showing their “president” noshing off the journalist (I wonder if we could do that with our flag and Queen), while making Islamaphobic assumptions about all Muslims (or rather projecting your own prejudices in the first place back onto them) or wrongly ascribing it to the fact that they are Muslim rather than the Russian conquest, all the while using an infantile “laugh at” not “laugh with” sense of humour?

   Are these Southern “Baptists” (v. sic) Muslim? Was “St” Helena when she threw the Jew down the well to tell her where the true cross was?

   And so like with Helena, Baron Cohen goes from from being a racist to some kind of Saint, however, I still don’t get how we go from “I my country there is a problem” to “Throw the Jew down the well”, unless we have fallen for that rather cheap parlour trick that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitism, although once again how “In my country there is a problem” can be seen as anti-semitic is again a bit of stretch…

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