Life imitates art in Kuwait
When a medalist from Kazakhstan was awarded her gold in an international competition in Kuwait, the music played was not the national anthem of her homeland, but rather music from the satirical film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan . Oops! The film is full of put-downs of Kazakhstan, and the song played included such lyrics as:
Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan you very nice place
From Plains of Tarashek to Northern fence of Jewtown
Come grasp the mighty penis of our leader
From junction with the testes to tip of its face!
Curiously, most reports of the blunder (for example, this, this, and this) neglected to name the specific international competition where the incident took place. The New York Daily News, however, came up with the information that it was the 10th Arab Shooting Contest, which strikes me as odd, since Kazakhstan, while Muslim-majority, is not Arab. While the name of the competition could mean that the targets, not necessarily the contestants, are Arabs, surely this cannot be the case.
I confess that I could not hum a single bar of the Kazakhstan national anthem, so if I have no claim to superiority over the hapless functionary who was a bit careless using a search engine. It cannot have helped that Kuwait banned the film Borat, so nobody there was alert to the possibility of a spoof anthem existing. Censorship leads to ignorance leads to mistakes. Of course, it is safe to predict that nobody in Kuwait will blame the censors, and they will hate the Jewish comedian who made the film all the more for their own fiasco.
Hat tip: ML
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