Criticism
Jody Rosen, writing for Slate, stated that with the song as well as his other antics Borat managed to offend everyone:
- ...Borat's performance of "In My Country There Is Problem (Throw the Jew Down the Well)" on an episode of Da Ali G Show a densely packed piece of sociopolitical parody: an incitement to pogrom ("Throw the Jew down the well/ So my country can be free/ You must grab him by his horns/ Then we have a big party") sung by a British Jew disguised as a Central Asian bumpkin before a whooping, Bud-swilling audience at a Tucson, Ariz., honky-tonk. It's hilarious. It's catchy. And it's a perfect distillation of Borat's satirical attack, designed to offend and indict just about everyone: Old Europe and Middle America, fulminating right-wingers and piously PC liberals, in addition to Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman.
After the episode had been broadcast, the Anti-Defamation League sent Baron Cohen an open letter warning him that, while they understood the message he had intended the sketch to deliver, they were concerned that this aspect may not have been grasped by his audience. The organization issued a similar statement prior to the release of the Borat film.
Others, notably columnists David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer, have expressed the opinion that the song, rather than being biting satire, was "a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly."
Read more about this topic: In My Country There Is Problem
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