Kazakhstan Means “Haters” in English
Many of you have probably seen "Da Ali G Show" on HBO and are familiar with the character of Borat. Borat (fictional, mind you) is supposed to be a television host from Kazakhstan -which Reuters claims is the "world’s ninth largest country" . The general premise of his character is that things are ass-backwards in Kazakhstan and he is learning about the customs of the civilized world for his viewers back in the ’stan. As Borat, he does shit on the ’stan, but he only does so as part of a larger attempt to shit on his interview subjects -which he does remarkably well.
In an incident last year that caused an uproar among the unwitting racists it outed, Borat (who is, once again, a fictitious person) showed that even in Americas bible belt, anti-semitism is still alive.
http://inhonor.net/videos/uped/fl_video.php?f_num=92500
It should be noted that the person (real) Sacha Cohen who plays the character of Borat and Ali G (and the gay-fashionista whose name escapes me) is in fact Jewish -which means that through the character of Borat he has helped unify the world through jokes -not unlike what I’m trying to do here. Maybe they should call him Martin Luther Cohen.
Anyway, after his appearance at the MTV Europe Awards the Kazakh government has threatened MLCohen with legal action and questioned if his whole Borat act was designed just to humiliate the ’stan those who live there.
"We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.
Hey "Yerzhan" no one, and I mean NO ONE had even heard of Kazakhstan before Da Ali G Show -personally, I was shocked that spell check recognized it. In fact if someone ever said "Kazakhstan" to me before I had seen the show I would have told them in a polite voice "It’s pronounced "pack-is-tan, moron."
It seems as though the specific false-claims about the ’stan which caused the beef were "Cohen’s earlier jokes, including claims that the people would shoot a dog and then have a party, and that local wine was made from fermented horse urine."
Honestly, if you have to go out of your way to tell people that your countries wine isn’t made from horse urine and that shooting a dog is not cause for celebration, it’s time to move.
