Cinema

Sacha Baron Cohen, Boycotter, Becomes the Boycotted as Ali G Returns

Sacha Baron Cohen backed the ADL's boycott of Facebook. As Ali G returns to cinemas, the boycotts are aimed at him, and the ADL has discovered it dislikes litmus tests.

Husam Sam Asi 24 October 2026, 12:56

Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G in Ali G: Who Iz I? Photo: Amazon MGM Studios

Ali G is back, and so are the pickets. Ali G: Who Iz I?, Sacha Baron Cohen’s first film for the character since Ali G Indahouse in 2002, slipped into a scattering of American cinemas on Friday for what Amazon MGM bills as one weekend only, trailing two boycott campaigns and a 50 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The first campaign comes from NewsCord, a British media watchdog that calls the character a racist caricature and says it has fired off more than 37,000 emails to cinema chains around the world. Its slogan is brutally simple: “The screens belong to the chains, and a booking is a choice.” Picturehouse, which runs 25 British cinemas, said it had no current plans to show the film, which it says is its standard answer for titles it has not scheduled.

The second campaign, circulating on social media, targets Baron Cohen’s past support for Israel. That one brought the Anti-Defamation League galloping to his rescue. “No artist should be pressured, blacklisted or silenced over their Jewish identity,” its chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote on X, warning against “ideological litmus tests” for Jewish artists.

The boycotter

Six years ago Baron Cohen stood on the other side of the picket line, next to the ADL. In 2020 the league co-founded Stop Hate for Profit, the campaign that persuaded more than 1,000 companies to pull their advertising from Facebook. That September Baron Cohen joined its celebrity freeze, going silent on Instagram for a day and tweeting: “Facebook — stop spreading the hate, lies and conspiracies that inflame our societies!” A year earlier, in a speech to the ADL, he had called the social media giants “the largest publishers in history”, NPR reported.

The war in Gaza sent him back to the barricades. Days after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, he joined a group of Writers Guild members, Jerry Seinfeld among them, who publicly rebuked their own union for staying silent. He then signed, with Amy Schumer and more than 700 others, an open letter to President Joe Biden about the hostages.

A month later he, Schumer and Debra Messing joined dozens of Jewish influencers on a private video call with TikTok’s executives. “Shame on you,” he told them. TikTok, he said, was “creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis” and could curb it at the flip of a switch. On the same call Messing urged the company to moderate the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

NewsCord has simply borrowed his playbook. In 2020 the argument ran that Facebook owned its pages, so every advert on them was a choice. In 2023 the platform owned its algorithm, so it could flip the switch. In 2026 the chains own their screens, so every booking is a choice. The weapon Baron Cohen helped sharpen against Mark Zuckerberg is now pointed at Ali G’s tracksuit.

In 2020, promoting Borat Subsequent Moviefilm over Zoom, he told me that governments must pass laws to regulate social media, because “conspiracy theories spread much faster than the truth, because the truth is boring”. Today he blames the same machine for the campaign against him. “I haven’t said anything about Israel,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that people are being portrayed on social media as things they are not, and that he sees “a trend of Jews being portrayed in certain ways and trying to be silenced”.

He saw it coming

Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as General Aladeen, holds a golden pistol to Husam Sam Asi's head, flanked by two women in military uniform holding rifles — Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as General Aladeen, holds a golden pistol to Husam Sam Asi’s head while promoting The Dictator in New York, May 2012. Photo: UKScreen archive

None of this would surprise the Baron Cohen I met at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills a decade ago. He arrived, as he always does, inside a ring of Israeli security men, a nervous team whose eyes scoured the room and examined everyone who came near him. “I know a lot of people hate me,” he told me, laughing. He was already tired of explaining his most famous creation. “Whenever I tell them that Ali G isn’t black, he wants to be black, they ask me: why didn’t you make that clear?” His defence then was a shrug: “Nobody is forced to watch my films.” NewsCord’s reply, ten years later, is that nobody is forced to show them either.

He also insisted that he and his writers debate the morality of every joke, and that a comedian must make sure his jokes question and weaken stereotypes. The critics are divided on whether Ali G clears that bar in 2026. The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz called the film “a deeply depressing full-circle moment for an artist who was once one of modern comedy’s sharpest satirists”. The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck found “plenty of laughs along the way”.

Litmus tests for some

The ADL’s sudden horror of blacklists deserves its own sketch. Hollywood has spent the past three years applying ideological litmus tests to anyone who speaks up for Palestinians. In 2023 the actress Melissa Barrera was dropped from the Scream franchise over her posts about Gaza, and Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency after a pro-Palestinian rally. Greenblatt’s tweet was careful to protect artists from being blacklisted “over their Jewish identity”. The principle, it seems, comes with an entry requirement.

There is a richer irony still. Baron Cohen built his career on luring people into exposing their prejudices and letting the public punish them. In 2018 his series Who Is America? ended the career of a Georgia state lawmaker who dropped his trousers and shouted racist slurs for the camera. Public pressure was his favourite punchline. “I trust the audience and I believe in their judgement,” he told me in 2020, when Rudy Giuliani was the one fuming about the verdict.

This weekend the audience gets its chance to judge Ali G, if it can find him. A week before the release, the showbiz columnist Roger Friedman found no bookings at all in the Los Angeles area and a single showing on Saturday and Sunday across three secondary New York cinemas. The boycotters may yet claim a victory that Amazon’s own release plan handed them for free.