A Muslim performing Jewish stereotypes would be arrested, a zionist like Cohen performing Black or Muslim stereotypes wins Oscars. That's the loophole, it's blackface. The Daily Mail isn't defending free speech, it's defending a wealthy white man's right to profit from racialised caricature, while attacking people objecting to it.
The Mask Remains
Blackface was never just burnt cork on a white man's skin, the paint represented a symbol, not the crime itself. The crime was that performers from a dominant supremacist group put on the masks of the people they were oppressing, performed the ugliest stereotypes and called it entertainment, all while real people were suffering the dehumanising consequences. The audiences laughed and sang along, the targets of the laughter bled in the streets. Lynched.
It was the entertainment industry mining the bodies of the oppressed for profit, and not much has changed.
Today, Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't paint his face, as the form of the racism at the heart of his performance has evolved. To a Muslim, black or gay person, watching him mock their people, faith and culture for white laughter while calling it "satire," the difference between him and a minstrel is barely possible to find. The mask isn't painted on, but he's still wearing one.
The cork was replaced by a costume, an accent and a defence that should have died with minstrel shows. Cohen isn't a satirist, he's a racist who has found a loophole, to mock people he thinks are powerless, while hiding in plain sight, encouraging an audience to laugh at people who never consented. Sacha Baron Cohen's latest piece of racist filmmaking is coming out soon, with the release of "Ali G: Who Iz I" and it looks to be his most vile blackface yet.
The Here & Now
People are asking more frequently, 'how have we got to where we are in Western societies?' The answer in part is due to the same dehumanising laughter that once justified lynchings now runs rampant across legacy and social media platforms to justify the abuse of brown and black bodies and those who live in poverty no matter what race they are. Take Palestinians for example, who are stripped of all humanity in coverage of the ongoing genocide, as they scrape up what remains of their obliterated children's dead bodies off rubble into plastic bags. Look at who the elite owned legacy media and bot accounts on Facebook, X and Reddit are telling you to hate, and ask why.
What have those people ever actually done to make your life worse, really, what? Ask who is hoarding all the wealth: is it the destitute refugee facing eviction, or is it the moneyed elite who own the land, the enterprises, own your labour? Is it the Filipino NHS nurse who can't even afford to eat anymore so they have to go to beg for food at a foodbank, or is it people like the owners of so-called "newspapers" like the Daily Mail? Is it the incinerated patients in hospitals in Gaza, or is it those who decide how much you get paid, who leave you in poverty for their own enrichment and luxury?
Dehumanisation is not a relic of the past, it's the active precondition for the drone strike, the eviction order, the extrajudicial killing, the fishing boat blown up in the ocean, are all people murdered by state "authorities". Cohen’s comedy didn't create this machinery, it embodies it, perfecting its most insidious features. As Empire's wars grind on, with fascist politicians and influencers continuing to gain ground across the West, the question is no longer whether entertainment can kill, but whether the people laughing will ever decide to stop.
History shows they will.
The Same Mechanism
When Cohen performs "Borat" he's an amalgamation of white-informed, hate-filled caricatures: anti-Islam, anti-Romani, anti-Eastern European. He acts as violent, lecherous, unhygienic, stupid. He's everything Western bigots already believe about the "Other" as legacy media has been manufacturing this hatred as part of a classic divide and conquer tactic for generations. Cohen joins the bigots, looks into their imaginations and acts their thoughts out on screen. The audience laughs at the cartoon, while real people, black, Muslim, Romani and Eastern European absorb the damage he perpetuates.
Cohen as "Ali G" doesn't put on black makeup, he shrouds himself in his version of what he thinks black culture is, mimicking his perceptions of their vernacular, their fashion, his understanding of their mannerisms and performs obscene stereotypes. He isn't mocking racism, he's performing it: the fact his face remains white is irrelevant. Peter Akinti, editor of Untold magazine, put it plainly, 'He's the new Al Jolson, he's effectively blacked up to take the piss out of a stereotype of young black men that's deeply offensive.' Felix Dexter, a Black British comedian from The Real McCoy, said in an interview as far back as the year 2000, 'a lot of the humour is laughing at Black street culture and it's being celebrated because it allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at that culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness.'
Not much has changed.
In "The Dictator," Cohen wears a fake beard, speaks in a thick faux-Arabic accent and performs every Islamophobe's wet dream: violent, misogynist, terrorist-sympathising, ridiculous. Dean Obeidallah, a comedian of Arab heritage, wrote, 'The Dictator is a modern-day minstrel show,' arguing Cohen's performance is, 'essentially the same as white performers in blackface portraying black people in buffoonish negative stereotypes.' Nadia Tonova of the National Network for Arab American Communities called his portrayal a reflection of how 'Arabs are among the few cultures that Hollywood still exploits with impunity.' He's performing Islamophobia, to manufacture consent for aggression against innocent people, for profit.
GLAAD, America's largest gay rights organisation, condemned Bruno for reinforcing negative stereotypes and 'decreasing the public's comfort with gay people.' GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios said, 'Some scenes hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes. Scenes like that don't help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool, then rush home to make dinner and be with their children.'
Obeidallah asked the only question that matters, 'What would the reaction be if a white actor in blackface mocked African-American culture?' The answer is swift rightful condemnation, and they may never work again. But when the target is black, brown or poor and doesn't have a million dollar propaganda budget to fight back, the question is rarely asked, the answer seemingly deemed irrelevant. An even starker question is, could a Muslim actor direct and star in a movie dressed as an exaggerated Orthodox Jew, with frizzy payot, big nose, fur hat speaking in a grating whining New York accent, obsessively counting money, scheming to control the media to be satirical? And if not, why is Cohen, a zionist, allowed to do the same as blackface?
Cohen and his backers operate from within their capitalist framework, with his films having grossed over $1 billion. That money flows upward from your pocket, to Cohen, studios and shareholders. Those subjected to his cultural appropriation and extractive techniques get humiliation, abuse and violence.
The Historical Continuity
Minstrel shows didn't invent anti-black racism, they inherited it, refined it and called it entertainment. And in making Black people laughable, it made Black people lynchable. White audiences didn't go straight from the theatre directly to a public lynching in the townsquare, but the laughter turned dehumanisation into entertainment, making violence against black bodies feel acceptable. Black people were being dehumanised, for a purpose: so that when lynchings (aka murders) did happen, people could take their children to watch it and buy souvenirs, without feeling any guilt.
The same logic operates today. American Empire didn't invent Islamophobia, but they did create the "war on terror", the crime against humanity of genocide in Gaza, the indefensible bombing of Yemen, the illegal occupation of Iraq, the act of aggression in invading Libya, the drone strikes on civilians living their lives across Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Palestine, the Caribbean and beyond. These are material realities. I've lived and worked in places where the dead are counted, counted by the millions: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Congo, in South Sudan, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Haiti, in Ethiopia.
Cohen, like blackface performers before him, inherited this hatred and refined it. He sells hatred by portraying the Muslim as violent, lecherous, stupid and ridiculous. He makes Muslims laughable, he makes Muslims bombable. The public lynching in the town square has gone, the drone strike watchable on CNN replaced it. Empire is merely capitalism's military wing. The drone strikes that follow Cohen's laughter clear the way for resource extraction, for pipelines, for more military bases. His dehumanisation is the prerequisite for the profit as the final destination.
Ask yourself, why did Cohen release The Dictator when he did? The project was announced on 19 January 2011 and it was released on 11 May 2012. Libya was first bombed on 19 March 2011, with Muammar Gaddafi being murdered on 20 October 2011. So while Western governments were illegally bombing Libya, Cohen and his team were writing and producing a "comedy" that would be released, in part, to help justify his overthrow. And do not forget, this illegal act of aggression by the Western world led to increasing migration into Europe and the UK as people fled the wars, that the UK helps start, as well as resulted in slave markets openly operating in Tripoli and elsewhere. This is how Hollywood and Western legacy media mines the bodies of the Global South to justify their wars, while making bank.
The Nazis understood this mechanism perfectly, they didn't begin with gas chambers, they began with caricature. Der Stürmer drew Jews with hooked noses, greedy hands and lecherous grins, while Germans increasingly told jokes about Jewish cowardice and filth. The entertainment came first, laughing dehumanisation into being. Only then came the laws, the camps, the crematoria. The laughter didn't cause the Holocaust, but the Holocaust couldn't have happened, being normalised within society, without the laughter and societal dehumanisation of the Other.
Cohen performs the same function in a different era, by depicting Muslims with beards, bombs and violent urges, by showing Romani people as incestuous thieves and rapists, by making Eastern Europeans into stupid, unhygienic animals, by showing Black British people not as they actually are, but as he perceives them to be. The laughter comes first, the drone strikes and lynchings follow, and refugees are criminalised and turned away. The slaughter in Gaza is being justified by the same dehumanisation Cohen broadcasts to millions. His onscreen depictions do the same work the burnt cork once did. Whether he understands that, is beside the point, it does not change reality.
The "Happy Negro" of plantation mythology was the enslaved person who sang while working, who loved his master, who was too simple for politics. Cohen's Borat is the same figure, the "Happy Muslim" too stupid to be a threat, too funny to be taken seriously, too ridiculous to mourn when the drone comes. Borat is the Happy Muslim, in the same way the Happy Negro was the content enslaved person: both figures exist to make violence against them feel unserious. Ali G is Cohen's Happy Negro: look at how they behave, they don't deserve your white liberal sympathy.
The Targets Speak
In the 19th and 20th centuries, white people kidnapped and displayed African and indigenous people in human zoos, caged and mocked for European audiences. France did it until 1994. Cohen doesn't bring his subjects to the core, he travels to the periphery, extracts his entertainment and returns it. He arrives with a camera, selects the most vulnerable, tricks them into performing their poverty and desperation, then profits. This is the logic of capitalism: turn everything into a commodity, especially human dignity.
Ask the villagers of Glod, Romania, who were tricked into appearing as incestuous rapists, prostitutes and thieves. They thought they were participating in a serious documentary about poverty. Instead, Cohen paid them $3 to $5 each and made them the punchline of a global joke. Dana Luca, a villager, said, 'We thought they came here to help us, not mock us. We are poor people, but we are still people.' Nicolae Staicu, their leader, said, 'These people are poor and they were tricked by people more intelligent than us.' They sued for $30m, as Cohen's project was 'intended to portray the villagers as rapists, abortionists, prostitutes, thieves, racists, bigots, simpletons and/or boors.' Cohen punches down on the most vulnerable people in society, performing exploitation with a camera.
Ask the disabled man with one arm who was tricked into taping a sex toy to his amputation stump. He wasn't told the true purpose of the film, he provided no real informed consent, he was not given the fair and honest context to make a decision about participation. Cohen used a disabled man's body as a prop for a non-consensual sight gag for a global, predominantly white audience to laugh at. He has done the same throughout his career: he is doing it to Black British people still. The Romanian villagers of Glod weren't collaborators, they were his exhibits, his version of a human zoo. Cohen isn't a satirist, he's a modern-day colonial ethnographer, extracting authenticity from the bodies of the vulnerable, poor, black and brown for profit and racist entertainment.
The Audience Trap
Some viewers may genuinely believe they're laughing at the bigots Cohen says he exposes. And while that's not impossible, he doesn't provide a clean way to do that. The same joke that mocks a racist, mocks a Muslim. The same frame that exposes a bigot, humiliates a Romani villager. Ignorance of this trap doesn't excuse falling into it. Not all white people were entertained by and laughed at minstrels: some understood what they represented. More people should understand what Cohen represents: he's an Islamophobe, a blackface racist perpetuating stereotypes just as minstrels did.
Golliwog dolls of Britain and Europe were beloved toys for decades, parents gave them to their children, I remember seeing them on marmalade jars. They weren't seen as hateful to white people. They were seen as cute, funny, harmless, and this is the same mechanism Cohen uses today. The audience doesn't see themselves as bigots, but as enjoying a joke: as Stewart Lee, a genuine satirist said while highlighting Top Gear's racism "it's just a joke". For white people, the golliwog, like the minstrel, was a joke too. For black people, it never was. When people being attacked are telling people they're being attacked, maybe it's time people listened. If someone attacks you, would you like people to listen, or just tell you, "it's just a joke"?
The core of Cohen's "it's satire" defence relies on an assumption that the audience is laughing at the racists, not the mocked. Cohen's defenders claim his caricatures, which again, are his perceptions of other people, not reality, are so exaggerated only a true bigot would believe them, but the audience is laughing at the cartoon, not the critique. The white person tells themselves they're in on the joke, that they're the clever ones. They're not the ones being mocked, but they are laughing at the same stereotypes that fuel hate crimes, encourage rejection of refugees fleeing wars the UK is involved in, while manufacturing consent for military interventionism. It's not big, it's not clever, it's complicity in racism.
The Weaponisation of Antisemitism
"But he's Jewish." So what? Being targeted by one form of bigotry doesn't grant immunity to perpetrate another. The question isn't whether Cohen has the right to mock antisemites or Jewish people, it's whether his work harms Black, Muslim, Romani, Eastern Europeans, Kazakhs, Romanians, people with disabilities, gay people, Arabs, and others. Their answer is a resounding yes, and that's all that matters. No one else's feelings matter.
The Daily Mail have published a piece of so-called journalism about NewsCord's campaign, which is a case study in manipulation, and it deserves to be named as such. Guy Adams' attempted 'hit piece' isn't journalism, it's designed to do exactly what the weaponisation of false accusations of antisemitism have always done: silence criticism by reframing it as bigotry. This is an inversion of reality and it should be rejected. Being Jewish doesn't immunise anyone from accountability for peddling hate, the same way Christians, Muslims or Sikhs aren't immunised. A multi-millionaire with a studio, a multi-million dollar marketing budget and a film opening worldwide isn't the victim here, the people he attacks with his racism are.
Being criticised by people doesn't make those critics antisemitic. They are the targets of a man who built his entire career on the racist caricature of the vulnerable to peddle hate, generating profit and his own self-aggrandisement. They are people who have had enough and are raising their voices: end blackface once and for all. The question isn't whether Cohen is Jewish, it's whether his targets have the right to speak. Myself, Nima and the NewsCord team believe they do have that right, why doesn't the Daily Mail? Guy Adams and the Daily Mail are attempting to answer this question for people by trying to discredit and silence those raising their heads up and saying "enough of this." The Daily Mail is using the manipulation tactics of an abuser to defend an abuser. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Racist's Deflection
The Daily Mail poses a strawman, which is deflection as they can't defend Cohen in reality. When asking, 'is Cohen being targeted just because he's Jewish' what they're doing is called JAQing off (Just Asking Questions). Guy Adams is JAQing off to the thought of smearing anti-racism campaigners, to try to close down rightful criticism of overt racism, criticising today's blackface. Your deflection is noted, Guy.
When the BBC faced a petition against the Black and White Minstrel Show in 1967, producers defended that racism by saying that blacking up was a 'traditional form of entertainment' that had 'lost any derogatory meaning' insisting the show was 'not about race'. When the BBC finally removed the Black and White Minstrel Show from air in 1978, 11 years after being petitioned to do so, it did neither out of a culture of cancellation nor as some form of moral reckoning or realisation of its racism. The BBC removed the racist show as the format had finally run out of steam, as audiences had understood, through awareness raising campaigns by the likes of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, that the show was inherently racist, harmful to the marginalised and finally stopped watching it.
The Black and White Minstrel Show cancelled itself, as society had progressed despite the show's racism, despite the BBC's efforts to keep people grounded in a culture of racialised hate, as people moved on, as they spoke to Black British people and realised the truth for themselves, so the show lost viewers. That's what NewsCord's campaign is about, it's mirroring the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination's efforts, all in the face of similar defences used back in the 60s and 70s. The Daily Mail can scream into the void all it likes, and Guy Adams can JAQ off to his heart's content, but at NewsCord, we're naming this abuse, naming this racism for what it is, and we're moving on, moving forward, and we'll never, ever be silenced.
Anti-racism campaigners don't need to justify themselves to a "newspaper" that supported the British Union of Fascists. Campaigners against racism don't need to defend their right to criticise a man who mocks people who he thinks can't fight back and will be silenced by JAQ-offs. NewsCord doesn't need to explain their tools or funding sources to a publication that has never explained its own. Instead, people like myself and Nima will continue to do what we have always done: tell the truth. Sacha Baron Cohen is today's blackface, and no amount of gaslighting, deflecting, strawmanning or whataboutism from the Daily Mail or anybody else, will ever change us and our determination to end this overt racism. Take note, Guy.
What Satire Actually Looks Like
If Cohen's work were satire, it would look very different. And yes, satire can punch in many directions, not just up. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" mocked the Irish poor to expose English cruelty, but the difference is, Swift's victims were dead, he didn't travel to Ireland, trick a 75-year-old woman into wearing silicone breasts and broadcast her shame to the world. The difference isn't the direction of the punch, but the flesh-and-blood on the receiving end.
George Carlin dismantled racism by attacking the structures and language that upheld it, not by performing the stereotypes he claimed to despise. Richard Pryor and Chris Rock mocked racism from within, using their own lived experience, not a costume created inside the mind of a bigot. Their comedy armed audiences to recognise and resist bigotry, not laugh at bigots, it never asked white audiences to laugh at a brown mask for their own self-edification.
Real satire doesn't need a signed waiver, a pauper's wage, to trick amputees or to destroy the reputation of a poor Romanian village as entertainment to make its point. This behaviour is cowardly, it's racism hiding in plain sight. Real satire doesn't require a production budget from a multinational media conglomerate. Cohen seems to be deluding himself into believing his work is some form of artisanal critique, when all it is, is industrial-scale slop served up as hot trash product for clickbait, manufactured with pain as the commodity, designed to generate returns, with "it's just a joke" as the coward's defence for racism. If it's "just a joke" can I tell you a stereotypical joke about Jewish people and retain my ethical moral compass? No, I could not. So why is a racist like Cohen allowed to hide behind this defence?
And finally...
Consider the double standard, if a white actor today wore blackface and performed a minstrel routine live on the BBC as they once did, their career would be rightly over. If anyone portrayed Jews on Netflix in the same way Cohen depicts Muslims, they would be arrested and prosecuted for hate crimes in places like Germany and the UK. That's what modern day Minstrelism is: poor black and brown pain as a commodity, as dehumanising entertainment. It's manufactured racism to soften and perpetuate Empire's crimes of genocide, land theft and dispossession.
And am I any different, did I laugh when I was in my teens when Ali G came out in 1998? Yes, I was a child in school in a society that was normalising the laughter. Do I laugh now? No, I am an adult who has engaged extensively with cultures on every continent for three decades now. I have been listening, hearing them all. I have heard them in places like Ethiopia telling me they are starving to death while Empire's wars wage. I've seen their shattered and dying bodies in al-Shifa's Emergency Department in 2014. I've sat with them in their pain in rape clinics in Rohingya refugee camps after they had to flee genocide and gang-rape by soldiers in Myanmar. I empathise strongly with all the oppressed peoples of the world. I humbly ask that you do likewise.
Human beings just like you are being murdered because people like Cohen manufacture hatred of the Other through racist entertainment. Just because NewsCord stands on the right side of history, with those who are the victims of genocide, doesn't make it antisemitic. A so-called "newspaper" weaponising false claims of antisemitism is doing more harm to Jewish people than people who are pro-Palestinian wanting One Democratic State in Palestine, asking for equal rights of all people living there. Why do zionists not want equal rights in their current Apartheid state, what is so wrong with that?
If you do decide to go see the film after reading this, at least you can't say you are ignorant anymore of the racism, you are partaking in it.
Call Cohen what he is: he's today's blackface.