My fear with this film was that a lot of people might watch it thinking "dumbass rag head arab", fuelled by prejudice created by the whole christian/moslem and white/arab post 9/11 thing, and use it simply as a vehicle to indulge their ignorant disparaging and stereotyped view of foreigners wiith dark skin and big moustaches.

I am starting to understand though that cohen could have used this character precisely to expose those kind of attitudes in people, in which case bring on the pricks, because they're either going to be exposed, feel very uncomfortable as they slowly begin to realise that they and their ilk are in fact the real butt of the joke, or they are going to laugh along, breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't them and slink away to their holes at the earliest given opportunity and maybe even start to reconsider their point of view.

The difficulty is, what if they are too stupid to get the irony and still believe that he is really a khazakstani or that the point is still about what geeks khazakstani's are (and what a joke their soldiers are, how easy it is to kick their heads in etc).

I mean it's all goddam Iraq at the end of the day isn't it!

And maybe some of his victims didn't deserve to be targets as much as others?

Time will tell. I'll probably see it when it comes out on video.