By Alan Macleod
Sacha Baron Cohen is being roundly condemned for his latest racist skit on national TV. But few people know how closely he has worked with both US and Israeli intelligence throughout his career.
In a 2009 interview with David Letterman, Baron Cohen casually mentioned that “Brüno” was made possible by the CIA, and that a CIA agent helped arrange much of the film. I managed to find that CIA agent and talk to him.
@JohnKiriakou told me that Baron Cohen was obsessed with finding a “terrorist” and making him look stupid on camera. Kiriakou advised against it, but Baron Cohen eventually interviewed Ayman Abu Aita — a Christian Palestinian NGO worker — and presented him as a radical jihadist in the movie. In this interview with Letterman, Baron Cohen casually refers to him as a “terrorist” eight times. Abu Aita’s life was ruined, and he sued for nearly $100 million. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum in 2012. Brüno depicts Muslims as rabid homophobic trash. But the most shocking and newsworthy case of exposing bigotry Baron Cohen has documented has never been revealed. Kiriakou notes that, while in character as Brüno in Jerusalem, Baron Cohen was beaten nearly to death by an enraged crowd of homophobic Israelis, who, angered by his camp and sacrilegious attire, started stoning him, on camera. A rabbi even spat on him. He was nearly killed. It was the only time in his career that he broke character and desperately yelled that he was an Israeli Jew, not a homosexual foreigner. The comedian fled for his life and found refuge in a nearby store bathroom. Read further on to find out why Baron Cohen would choose to never reveal this footage.
From an early age, Baron Cohen’s friends note that he was an obsessive Zionist who went to live in Israel in his youth. He grew up idolizing Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and met him in 2012. In 2019, Baron Cohen starred in “The Spy”, an Israeli series idolizing Mossad agent Eli Cohen. Cohen goes deep undercover in Syrian high society, providing intelligence to Israel that was crucial for its victory over Syria in the 1967 war. To this day, Israel illegally occupies Syrian and Palestinian land captured in 1967. “The Spy” was directed by a former Israeli paratrooper, who worked closely with the Mossad to produce it. The series has been used extensively in Mossad recruitment campaigns.
“Brüno” was also made with the help of the US military. Baron Cohen’s character visits a US military base, in order to become more manly. Baron Cohen insists that his production company lied to the military and was forced to flee the scene once they were rumbled, escaping under a rapidly descending road block, like in the famous scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. But this doesn’t hold water. Firstly, are we meant to believe no one at the military base recognized one of the world’s most famous comedians playing an iconic character that had been around for more than a decade? Secondly, the military base scene features a lot of back-and-forths with military officers that sound blatantly scripted. And moreover, it is illegal to use footage from inside US military installations without express permission from the Dept of Defense, who must have cleared it afterwards. Thanks to Freedom of Information requests, we also have the weekslong email conversations/negotations between “Brüno” producers and the military.
Let’s talk about “The Dictator”, Baron Cohen’s 2012 satire of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Written and filmed at exactly the same time as NATO was working with jihadists to overthrow Gaddafi and turn the country into an open-air slave market, the movie features some of the crudest Islamophobic stereotypes seen anywhere on television. Muslims are presented as interested only in killing Americans or molesting women, while Gaddafi himself is working on developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel. “The Dictator” was released just after the NATO intervention that empowered pro-US jihadist forces and destroyed what was once Africa’s most prosperous nation, and could not have been better timed for US and Israeli interests. In other words, this is regime change propaganda dressed up as satire.
In his latest TV appearance, Baron Cohen’s Borat character claimed that, in Kazakhstan, Kamala Harris would be arrested and executed for marrying a Jewish man. This is a gross lie played for laughs with a public that has been fed decades of Islamophobic propaganda. In reality, Kazakhstan was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust, the country taking in huge numbers of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. Today, Jewish group praise the country as a model of tolerance. But you know where it is illegal for Kamala Harris to marry a Jew? Baron Cohen’s beloved Israel, where inter-faith (i.e. interracial) marriage is strictly prohibited by law.
