He absolutely was punching down. He used his high status to mock a low-status (in the West) ethnicity, and shamelessly used selective editing to make everyone other than himself look like a bigot and an asshole. When rightly criticized for this, he acted like he was the victim.

It was an awful display which has not aged well and will look even worse over time.

I'd say that's a minority opinion, not especially supported by facts.

Regardless, his movies/tv shows always involved massive amounts of editing and manipulation.

Like the time they portrayed some random (Christian) Palestinian as a leader of a Islamist terrorist brigade which supposedly had a huge negative impact on his life.

Just this incident alone shows that Sacha Baron Cohen is a horrible and a despicable person.

Rich dude makes fun of a nation for being poor and when they take issue he plays antisemitism card.

Sure, that's one way you could describe things, although not especially accurately.

Yeah, but I see his point about getting away with this type of humor only because most viewers hardly know Kazachstan actually exists. I might be upset if I were a Kazakh, or I might not be - but I probably would find I hilarious.

> because most viewers hardly know Kazachstan actually exists

I really don't mean to be insulting to US people here, but I really think this would be a huge difference in the populations between the US and other countries where the film was popular.