The British media watchdog behind the campaign to shut down Jewish actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming Ali G movie is a virulently anti-Israel group whose history, and the identity of its financial backer, suggest it may be leveraging complaints that the film stereotypes black rappers in order to undermine Baron Cohen, a prominent supporter of Israel.
The campaign by the group, NewsCord, comes as another U.K. anti-Israel media group—backed by the same Irish investor who just took a significant stake in NewsCord—is deriding the Ali G film as the work of a “tired-looking Zionist,” according to a Washington Free Beacon review of financial documents and public statements.
MGM, the studio owned by Amazon, released a trailer last week for Ali G: Who Iz I? It’s the first time in 20 years that Baron Cohen will play the character, a cartoonish white rapper who claims he is black. NewsCord has been on the attack, demanding that “cinemas worldwide refuse to screen” the film and saying that Baron Cohen perpetuates outdated racial stereotypes of Jamaican men. The media watchdog is orchestrating a campaign to generate tens of thousands of emails, purportedly from irate moviegoers, urging theatres to drop the movie. NewsCord announced on August 26 that the U.K. chain Picturehouse Cinemas would not be screening the films (Picturehouse denies this). The campaign has received extensive coverage in the closely read Hollywood trade publications, which have focused on the controversy over alleged racial stereotypes and made no mention of the Israel connection.
“It seems Amazon, a company which directly assists the Israeli military in killing people, is financing and distributing Israel lobbyist Ali Genocide’s new ‘film,'” wrote X user @Lowkey0nline, just one of several posts in which critics smear Baron Cohen for his support of Israel. “Amazon also worked on his last Borat ‘film’ in 2020.”
Many of the film’s online antagonists are referring to it as “Ali Genocide.” They are also dredging up apocryphal stories that Baron Cohen has worked with Israeli intelligence. There is no evidence that the actor has had any interactions with Israeli intelligence beyond research he did for his role in The Spy, a Netflix miniseries in which he played Eli Cohen, the Mossad agent who went undercover in Syria in the 1960s.
The campaign against Baron Cohen is a departure for NewsCord, which was born in late 2023 out of a “hack for Gaza” and got its start—roughly a month after Hamas’s October 7 attack—as an AI-powered platform combating supposed media bias about the Gaza conflict. NewsCord, which has a “Gaza Genocide” tab on its homepage, routinely lambastes publications for not describing Israel’s war effort in Gaza as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and the “occupation’s ethnic cleansing,” among other charged terms.
NewsCord’s campaign against Baron Cohen was launched about a month after it received an investment from the used car salesman and media financier Cecil Hetherington in Ireland—a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment—through his Ulidia Investments Limited, financial disclosures reviewed by the Free Beacon show. Hetherington’s firm assumed a 20 percent stake in NewsCord stock around the same time one of his other beneficiaries, the fiercely anti-Israel publication Canary Media, was touting efforts to cancel Ali G and describing Baron Cohen as a “tired-looking Zionist” flogging a racist movie. Hetherington owns 20-50 percent of Canary.
Hetherington is also on the board of Declassified UK, an investigative site that is a frequent and harsh critic of Israel.
Canary wrote last week that the reemergence of Baron Cohen’s Ali G character after 20 years is unwelcome because of the comedian’s association with Israel.
“A big problem for viewers is that they know a lot more about the real Sacha Baron Cohen. Specifically, what they’ve taken exception to is his support for Israel; support which he gave when Israel was subjecting Palestine to apartheid conditions, and which has continued throughout the genocide in Gaza,” Canary wrote in an August 27 post that casts the actor as an “Israel lobbyist” and refers to the new film as “Ali Genocide.” The piece included multiple social media posts from left-wing anti-Israel activists angry that MGM/Amazon Studios is behind Baron Cohen’s latest film.
Nima Akram, NewsCord’s founder and CEO, confirmed to the Free Beacon that Hetherington’s Ulidia Investments Limited is now a 20 percent stakeholder but maintained the Irish investor and his firm have no influence on the campaign against Baron Cohen. The recent investment, he said, is “completely unrelated and Ulidia were not consulted, nor have we ever discussed the campaign to date.” Ulidia, he added, “has never had any influence on any of our campaigns.”
Akram also denied that Baron Cohen’s pro-Israel advocacy has anything to do with the effort to see Ali G canceled.
“This campaign is about the racist stereotypes the Ali G character reinforces. It has nothing to do with Sacha Baron Cohen’s connection to Israel, and any suggestion that it does is false,” he said. “Ali G trades on a caricature of black British and Jamaican culture. The defense that the joke is on a white man trying to be black does not survive contact with how audiences actually receive it. For viewers who have little or no contact with Jamaicans in real life, the character becomes the reference point. That is how a stereotype takes hold, whatever the intent behind it.”
But when NewsCord was started less than three years ago, the platform centered primarily on opposition to Israel. Akram said at the time that Western media are guilty of “justifying and manufacturing consent for Israel’s war” through biased framing that omits charged language like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “Israeli occupation.”
After NewsCord was birthed in the “Hack for Gaza”—which enlisted developers to create digital tools to “support Gaza’s resilience”—it initially operated under the “Tech for Palestine” umbrella, a nonprofit “starting and scaling initiatives for Palestinian liberation,” and received a “£250k funding round” in July of this year to help ramp up operations.
Most of NewsCord’s past work has centered around the Gaza conflict and the media’s portrayal of it. The organization says it is responsible for facilitating “over 20,000 formal complaints to Western media outlets,” according to a July 10 profile in the New Arab.
“We all saw the way the Western media was justifying and manufacturing consent for Israel’s war, subduing the public into just accepting what it was doing with complete impunity,” Akram told the publication.
NewsCord published an April report, for instance, that accused the BBC of “failing to name Israel as the perpetrator in half of analysed reports on civilian deaths in Gaza.” The report prompted antisemitic British politician Jeremy Corbyn to call the BBC’s coverage “manufactured consent for genocide.” NewsCord additionally administers multiple active campaigns to pressure media outlets into altering their coverage of the Gaza conflict as well as the U.S.-led war against Iran.
NewsCord also recently took credit for successfully urging the embattled Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the New York-based group, to continue including terror-tied “journalists” on its influential list of reporters killed in Gaza. The controversy—spurred on by a recent series of Free Beacon reports about how the CPJ’s list is filled with confirmed terrorists mislabeled as slain “journalists”—resulted in the CPJ’s board recently voting 17-1 to affirm that “organizations affiliated with militant groups” meet the criteria of legitimate journalistic outlets.
“CPJ changed who it counts as a journalist, and its board chair, Jacob Weisberg, drove the change, against a definition international humanitarian law has already settled: a journalist affiliated with an armed group is a civilian, not a combatant, unless directly taking part in hostilities,” NewsCord writes on its website. “Demand CPJ restore its own definition, remove Jacob Weisberg as chair, appoint a Palestinian representative to the board, and let an independent human rights lawyer sign off [on] the methodology.”
Neither MGM/Amazon Studios nor Baron Cohen’s representatives at William Morris Endeavor responded to a Free Beacon request for comment on NewsCord’s campaign.
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