"Bruno" Terrorist Interviewee Claims He Was Tricked, Plans to Sue

If you’ve seen Bruno or the ads for it, you know about the terrorist part.  Sacha Baron Cohen/Bruno sits down with a stern-looking mustachioed man in Israel’s West Bank and lobs fashion insults at his “king” Osama bin Laden (specifically that he looks like a “dirty wizard” and a “homeless Santa”).

The interviewee, who is presented as “Ayman Abu Aita, terrorist group leader, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade,” makes a fist-clenching motion and says a bunch of sentences that Baron Cohen’s translator renders as “Get out!  Get out!”  But in a new interview, Aita claims that Baron Cohen is a “big liar,” and that he himself is no terrorist at all.  Details/video ATJ…  

According to sketchy, fringe-y internet newspaper World Net Daily, Aita

said he was shocked when he learned five days ago the film depicts a homosexual character and contains scenes including full frontal male nudity and graphic homosexual fetish sex.

Aita also slammed Baron Cohen as a “big liar” who “made up stories” when describing to CBS’s David Letterman last week the way he met Aita at an undisclosed location. Aita said he is pursuing legal action against Baron Cohen.

He didn’t realize Bruno was gay!  Hilarious.  He also remarked that he did not think Bruno dressed or acted in any unusual manner.

“He behaved very normally.”

“There was nothing special,” continued Aita. “He said he is a German actor making documentaries watched by young people. … He wanted to make a story to mobilize the young people to help us (Palestinians). … I didn’t have any impression he would use my interview in a bad way.”

This is hard to believe, given the way the interview seems to go in the movie.  And in the predictable-but-not-without-substance wave of Bruno backlash, the tears of a terrorist are likely to gain little sympathy.  Aita claims he’s out of the game, however:

Aita served in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from 2000 until 2003, after which he did a two year stint in Israeli prison on accusations he was involved in shootings against Israeli soldiers operating in Bethlehem. Still, according to Israeli security sources speaking to WND, Aita, while a member of the Brigades, once worked with Jewish state officials to return two Israeli reserve soldiers who had gotten lost in Bethlehem.

Of course, for his purposes (which include a lawsuit against Baron Cohen/Universal), Aita needs to look like a stand-up non-terrorist, just as for his purposes, Sacha Baron Cohen needed to look like a gay Austrian fashion designer.  My read is that there are a lot of lies flapping against each other from both sides, and most likely the “reality” of what happened in that room in the West Bank has been lost in all that.

Here’s the clip.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but for those of you who have, does Aita’s story check out at all?

Baron Cohen describes the rendezvous here:

Source: WND via HuffPo.