Kazakhstan accuses Ali G over 'anti-semitic slurs'

Ali G star Sacha Baron Cohen has found himself in hot water with Kazakhstan for suggesting that the nation is anti-Semitic.

Cohen, who has become a cult celebrity in the US with Da Ali G Show, was condemned for calling the central Asian country “a wild den of misogynistic dog-shooting Gypsy and Jew-haters".

Kazakhstan embassy spokesman Roman Vassilenko, in the US, said: “I do have a sense of humour. But it’s not quite helpful and perhaps harmful to portray a country where ’Throw the Jew down the well’ is a famous folk song’.”

He was referring to an incident on Da Ali G Show recently when Cohen, posing as a Kazakhstani journalist named Borat, led people in an Arizona bar in song.

The tune, called In My Country There Is Problem, contained the line: “Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free.”

The criticism of Cohen, 33 himself a Jew, comes a day after news emerged that he was nearly lynched at a rodeo for saying President George Bush drank the blood of dead Iraqis.

Cambridge-graduate Cohen convinced organisers of the rodeo that he was filming a documentary about America.

He told them he supported the war on terrorism and said: “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards.

“And may George W Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”

“If he had been out there a minute longer, I think someone would have shot him,” commented local Robynn Jaymes.