A local Republican leader says he was deceived
Michael Aboud, who leads the Republican Party in El Paso County, has said he intends to take legal action against Sacha Baron Cohen over material featuring him in the new comedy Ali G: Who Iz I? Until the Guardian approached him on Tuesday, the businessman had no idea he was appearing in anything other than what he understood to be a factual film. In his statement, Aboud described Cohen and the whole crew as liars who trick people for their own gain, saying they had pitched the project as a documentary on people crossing the border illegally before adding a self-defence instructor from Israel.[S1][S2]
Aboud went further in the same statement, saying it was his view that Cohen is a pervert, and referring to remarks he attributed to the comedian about Muslims and sexuality. He urged people not to spend any money on anything Cohen produces or appears in, and confirmed his plan to sue. When asked afterwards whether he stood by what he did on camera, Aboud declined to comment.[S1]
What the film shows its recruits doing
In the film, Aboud enrols in a training programme run by another of Cohen's characters, a former Mossad operative presented as a terrorism expert named Col Erran Morad. The recruits, described as Maga sympathisers, are taught self-defence methods that include wearing plastic protective buttocks over their clothing, and are shown how to discharge bullets from the middle of those buttocks by working a rubber penis up and down.[S1]
Morad then draws Aboud and a fellow participant, the former preacher and aspiring actor Joshua Loudermilk, into a supposed operation aimed at stopping a fictional South American drug lord's child from being born on American soil. The pair are filmed abducting the kingpin's heavily pregnant girlfriend, transporting her in a fake ambulance to an isolated medical site with no staff, where she delivers a lifelike prosthetic baby. They leave her behind and head for Mexico with what Morad has placed in a zipped bag; Loudermilk is later seen trying to fire from his fake buttocks, while Aboud decides to drop the baby, then suspended from a drone at considerable height, so that it never touches US ground.[S1]
Understand this article deeper
Clues the participants say they missed
The film states repeatedly that neither Aboud nor Loudermilk was in on the deception. Loudermilk did not answer requests for comment, though his social media activity hints at a greater awareness of the project than most other participants had. Earlier this week he wrote on Facebook that he had spent twelve hours alone with Cohen, who he said taught him a great deal about the pleasure of making people laugh, and shared a link to a promotional video for the film, noting that he appears in the trailer. On 10 January he posted a headshot of himself announcing that he had finished the Cohen movie and was ready for more. Representatives for the film told the Guardian that Loudermilk did not know what the film really was.[S1]
Aboud's surprise is notable because he and Loudermilk both appear in the film's second trailer, released a fortnight ago. That clip alone offers strong hints that matters are not as they seem: addressing the recruits, Morad warns them not to be fooled, listing the jobs he says immigrants will not be coming to do for them before telling them the newcomers are coming to kill them.[S1]
Other targets of the satire
Elsewhere in the film, Ali G fronts a free-speech web programme and is handed a dubious script by a South African producer, Dirk Visser, who could not be reached for comment. The character also hosts a gameshow devised by Visser in which contestants race the clock to push mannequins representing people labelled undesirables, among them rappers, gay people, Muslims and Mexican babies, into mock shower stalls, then press a button that appears to release the poison gas Zyklon B; the sequence closes with a mass Nazi salute.[S1]
One participant is the former Republican congressman George Santos, who was expelled from the House and tells the camera that his lesson from the game is that he would try to grab more babies next time, since they fit into the shower more easily. In messages to the Guardian, Santos also indicated he had not understood the film's real character, saying that neither he nor his team had any involvement, and he declined to defend his conduct.[S1]
