Kazakh Writer Nominates 'Borat' Creator for 'Glorious' Award -- But Krauthammer Knocks Him

By: E&P Staff and The Associated Press Very nice, as the now-famous foreign journalist Borat Sagdiyev might put it.

Government officials in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan have been enraged by the unflattering portrayal of their country in the hit mockumentary, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." But now a leading Kazakh writer has nominated the creator of the character and film, Sacha Baron Cohen, for a national award for "popularizing" Kazakhstan.

Novelist Sapabek Asip-uly called on the Kazakh Club of Art Patrons to give Baron Cohen its annual award, according to a letter published by the Vremya newspaper on Thursday.

The bumbling, anti-Semitic character Borat "has managed to spark an immense interest of the whole world in Kazakhstan, something our authorities could not do during the years of independence," said Asip-uly. "If state officials completely lack a sense of humor, their country becomes a laughing stock," Asip-uly said.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer has weighed in, observing today that "Borat" is "many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway money-maker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as columnist David Brooks astutely points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly.

"But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to but which requires elaboration: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude of many liberal Jews toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals."

Krauthammer concludes: "This is crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by a Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?"

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said earlier this week that Borat has helped to make Kazakhstan better known in the West and he invited Baron Cohen to visit the Central Asian state.

The film, which follows Borat on a trip across the U.S. to report back to his homeland on American culture and lifestyle, has become a runaway hit while generating controversy for scenes depicting misogyny and racism.

"I truly hope my initiative will be supported for the benefit of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan," Asip-uly said.

Asip-uly is known for several novels describing the Russian colonization of Kazakh lands and the Stalinist purges against Kazakhstan's political and cultural elite in the 1930s.

In a recent interview, "Borat" described the most important story he ever covered as a journalist: "Last year, I cover the annual feast of Shurik. Two millions shepherds come down from the Tinshein Hills and gather in a field, where they get very drunk on ferment horse urine, then dig a big hole that they fill with dog and Uzbek. They then throw potato on them for two day, before comb each other's hair and return to hills."