How Pro-Palestine Activists Attempted to Ignite a Boycott of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G Sequel

One of the most intriguing things about Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical sequel Ali G: Who Iz I? — out in limited theatrical release, to mixed reviews, and now streaming on Amazon Prime Video — occurred off-screen.

The film’s first trailer debut on Aug. 25 triggered plenty of online backlash about the iconic character, which has long functioned as a Rorschach test. The British commentator Afua Hirsch argued, “Black people don’t dress like that anymore. Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. Sexualizing black women and casually mocking working class women is not accepted anymore. Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.”

Cohen anticipated the outcry, reposting the trailer with the observation, “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.” Then, after the fallout amplified, he posted a promotional clip of a progressive academic character from “the Campaign for Ethical Comedy,” also played by Cohen, who urged a boycott of the project: “I’m sure you’ve heard of our five C’s: Consider, contextualize, consult community, and obtain consent before you laugh — that’s right, do the work before you smirk.” The comedian-provocateur has in the past made it clear that Ali G’s mannerisms and aesthetics are meant in part as a critique of white British youth who adopt exaggerated versions of Black American and Black British cultural styles.

One notable element of the activist boycott campaign against the film has been a U.K.-based online media activism platform called NewsCord. It published an op-ed characterizing Cohen’s work as “blackface” and focuses most of its advocacy efforts on coverage of the conflict in Gaza. NewsCord’s past campaigns have included demands for the “immediate release of Global Sumud Flotilla Participants,” who it announced were “kidnapped in international waters by the Zionist entity.” The U.S. Treasury has designated the flotilla’s leaders as Hamas-affiliated operatives.

NewsCord claims that its campaign has sent about 55,000 emails to pressure exhibitors to refuse to screen the film. Its system provides users with personalized templates to mass-send letters with the help of a “specialized language model.” NewsCord’s Ali G action page features an automated checklist to easily direct complaints to businesses ranging from Cineworld and Odeon in the U.K. to Landmark and Cinemark in the U.S. The platform noted that Picturehouse, a small London-headquartered chain of British cinemas, had informed NewsCord that it wasn’t planning to screen Ali G: Who Iz I? “That is the outcome every letter asks a chain for,” NewsCord wrote, explaining Picturehouse was now “off the send list.”

On Oct. 23, as the film premiered in theatres, the platform heralded victory in its campaign. It pointed to Amazon’s limited final exhibition plan (the studio called it a “stunt release”), while misleadingly contending that a total of “55,000 people emailed cinema chains” through its platform.

NewsCord was incubated by the nonprofit Tech for Palestine, which describes its mission as “cultivating a garden of projects and services that shut down genocidal speech.” The organization’s agenda to influence Wikipedia pages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict and related topics has been criticized by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies as well as the U.S.’s Anti-Defamation League.

In October 2024, Tech for Palestine’s founder and CEO Paul Biggar wrote that Israel was “astroturfing IMDb’s review system to manufacture consent for genocide,” and offered detailed instructions to “counteract the inflated popularity” of four documentaries about the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in Israel — including We Will Dance Again, which aired on Paramount+ — by downvoting existing reviews and taking other measures against IMDb. The related activist enterprise Boycat, an app incubated by Tech for Palestine, has urged boycotts of Disney’s 2025 films Snow White, starring Gal Gadot, referencing her support of Israel, and Captain America: Brave New World, due to “its inclusion of Sabra, an Israeli superhero originally portrayed as a Mossad agent, played by Shira Haas, an actress with ties to the Israeli military.”

Cohen, a Brit, is one of Hollywood’s most prominent Jews working on-screen. He’s told of being discovered early in his career as a performer for his parody of a sweaty Hasid, courted controversy when his bigoted character Borat sang “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” and more recently he played the legendary Israeli Mossad agent Eli Cohen in Netflix’s limited series The Spy. Cohen gave a widely-circulated keynote address to the ADL in 2019, in which he discussed how “as a comedian, I’ve tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice,” before explaining how he thinks the internet has become “the greatest propaganda machine in history,” which is now spreading “the oldest conspiracy theory in history — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.” (He has also reportedly been forceful with TikTok over its allowance for antisemitic rhetoric on its platform.)

“While we expected some pushback for resurrecting a character from a different time, we were really disheartened to see firsthand the attacks on Sacha because he is a Jewish public figure,” says Monica Levinson, an executive producer on Ali G: Who Iz I?, in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. She’s collaborated with Cohen on previous projects, including Borat andBrüno. “The coordination, messaging and scale of the attack has been astounding.”

NewsCord and Tech for Palestine didn’t respond to THR’s inquiries. When THR asked Cohen about the boycott campaign of the Ali G sequel during an interview prior to its release, he replied, “a lot of the stuff on social media is orchestrated, and not necessarily orchestrated by people who really believe in what they’re saying,” adding, “I’m not surprised that prominent Jews are being targeted. I knew that this was going to happen. The level of organization is surprising, but this is a trend of Jews being portrayed in certain ways and trying to be silenced.”