Sacha Baron Cohen released the sequel to the groundbreaking Borat fourteen years later in a bid to alarm Americans about the dangerous slide to authoritarianism shortly before the general election.
While the sequel continued its tradition of offending both Americans and Kazakhs, French Muslims in addition seem to have taken offense this time.
The Times reported, the official poster of the sequel shows an almost naked Cohen, wearing a ring engraved with the word ‘Allah’. French Muslims later urged the authorities to remove all Borat 2 posters from public transportation to which the Paris transport authority (RATP) said a resounding no.
RATP said that it “would under no circumstances take this campaign off" their network, dismissing the requests to remove the posters from the side of all vehicles. French Muslims are now calling out the government for ‘provoking and insulting Islam.’
Borat 2 poster on Paris buses Twitter
A second bus company 'TICE network', in the southern suburb of Évry - which is home to 'a large Muslim immigrant population,' decided to remove the posters. But the organization said, their decision was not influenced by public outrage; rather the management deemed the off-beat humour of Borat 2 'inappropriate' for public transportation.
Emotions are running high among Muslims after the French president Macron vehemently refused to renounce the country’s laws permitting blasphemous caricatures and sparked protests across the Muslim world following the gruesome murder of teacher Samuel Paty - who had shown his class a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed.
Following the protests and boycotts of French goods across the world, Macron told the Al-Jazeera network over the weekend that he understood the caricatures could be shocking for some, and that France is fighting Islamic extremism, not Islam itself.