‘Training’ A.I. to Be Anti-Zionist

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, October 29, 2026

 

Sacha Baron Cohen likely brought back his Ali G character to troll the remaining wokesters with its juvenile attempt at humor. But it seems to have actually revealed something else: an AI fueled network of astroturf pro-Palestinian activism targeting a much wider range of Jewish creatives.

 

“Ali G” is the name of Cohen’s character that spoofed white British kids who appropriated what they perceived as black culture. In the ensuing years he would go on radio stations and curse and tell dirty jokes, leading to the occasional apology from a broadcaster. On his show, Ali G would try to embarrass guests, especially politicians who didn’t get the joke.

 

No one was clamoring for Ali G’s return. And judging by the reviews of the new movie Cohen has released, few are celebrating the tired character’s un-retirement.

 

But a more interesting aspect of this controversy is that, during Ali G’s hiatus, Cohen took a more serious turn as an actor, as when he played the famed Israeli spy Eli Cohen on a hit Netflix series, and began campaigning against anti-Semitism in public life. He thus earned himself a different slate of critics: angry online anti-Zionists.

 

The Hollywood Reporter investigates a company called NewsCord’s central role in the anti-Cohen protests and, crucially, its history of focusing solely on blocking Jewish and Israel-related content from seeing the light of day.

 

NewsCord “focuses most of its advocacy efforts on coverage of the conflict in Gaza. NewsCord’s past campaigns have included demands for the ‘immediate release of Global Sumud Flotilla Participants,’ who it announced were ‘kidnapped in international waters by the Zionist entity.’ The U.S. Treasury has designated the flotilla’s leaders as Hamas-affiliated operatives.”

 

So we have a traditional pro-Palestinian organization: ties to unseemly characters and easy-to-find anti-Semitism just underneath the surface. And how does this operation work? Well, “work” is a very generous description. Nobody there does much work. Instead, they let an AI engine take care of the activism: “Its system provides users with personalized templates to mass-send letters with the help of a ‘specialized language model.’”

 

Anti-Semitic campaigns used to require some effort, some commitment. Now online Jew-baiting and blacklisting are moving into their Jetsons era, a futuristic digital playground. If you thought anti-Semites were ignorant before, just wait till they fully indulge their laziest instincts.

 

Speaking of ignorance, THR reports another element of the anti-Zionist campaign:

 

“NewsCord was incubated by the nonprofit Tech for Palestine, which describes its mission as ‘cultivating a garden of projects and services that shut down genocidal speech.’ The organization’s agenda to influence Wikipedia pages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict and related topics has been criticized by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies as well as the U.S.’s Anti-Defamation League.”

 

It’s part of the wider Wikipedia info op, which seeks to hijack online knowledge collectives. Anti-Zionists focus on sites like Wikipedia because—and here comes the circular nature of the whole thing—they are fodder for AI language models and their training programs. In other words, emerging AI chatbots consume information from sites like Wikipedia to form a base level of their own information catalogue. There has been a similar campaign targeting Reddit, for example, because that is another site where Internet users go to get recommendations and participate in group chats about myriad individual topics. AI engines treat these sites as models for what online networks know and even, to some extent, how people communicate online.

 

The “input,” then, is pro-terrorist garbage—which then becomes the output on future chatbots.

 

The point is not to inform or educate on the subject but to bury the truth like an ancient city excavated by archaeologists millennia after it had been thought lost forever.

 

The line about shutting down “genocidal” speech is a euphemistic way to cover its anti-Semitic intent. But all told, the group doesn’t put much effort into trying to fool anyone. Tech for Palestine’s founder once “offered detailed instructions to ‘counteract the inflated popularity’ of four documentaries about the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in Israel — including We Will Dance Again, which aired on Paramount+ — by downvoting existing reviews and taking other measures against IMDb.”

 

Spamming films about Jewish loss and mourning, in other words. In this case, the target is a Jewish actor because of the projects he’s done that relate to Israel and anti-Semitism. Which is the ultimate irony: Now the controversial name isn’t “Ali G,” but “Cohen.”