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Posted 15 January 2005 - 09:10 AM
Borat Sagdiyev, they don't like him in Salem.
Borat's done it again ... and nearly got lynched for ripping into George W Bush and the Star Spangled Banner.
Ali G star Sasha Baron Cohen posed as his Kazakhstan journalist character Borat Sagdiyev at a rodeo in Salem, Virginia.
Cohen had convinced organisers that he was filming a documentary about America.
After telling the crowd he supported America's war on terrorism, he 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."
Then he asked if he could show his appreciation by singing the Star Spangled Banner. His version ended with the words "your home is the grave".
The crowd loudly booed Cohen’s rendition of the much-loved anthem.
According to a report in the North Carolina's Roanoke Times, the crowd turned "downright nasty." One observer said "If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him."
Rodeo organisers, realising they had been hoaxed, had Cohen escorted from the site.
"Had we not gotten them out of there, there would have been a riot," rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. "They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there."
It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK and on HBO in the United States.
In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called Throw the Jew Down the Well at a US country music bar, prompting protests from the US-based Anti-Defamation League.
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