We don't deal with foreign news too often on this blog, but this is too good not to pass along. The government of Israel is holding hearings in the Knesset, its legislature, before the Defense and Security Committee, to determine why Israel's image is so bad in much of the world. A reasonable person might guess that 60 years of quashing the hopes of residents of Palestine for their own homeland could be a reason. Or, say, building settlements on land that doesn't belong to you; or using air strikes, tanks, flame throwers and phosphorus bombs to destroy the infrastructure of Gaza while killing hundreds of children, in order to "punish" Hamas militants. Apparently, however, those reasons aren't sufficient. Today, an Israeli public relations expert explained it all before the committee. It turns out that Israel's PR problems come from being "Borat-ed" by Arabs. That's right. Ido Aharoni, PR mogul, told the committee that "The Arabs, our adversaries, have succeeded in doing to us what 'Borat' did for Kazakhstan." The irony of Sasha Baron Cohen, a Jewish writer-director who created the Borat character, being blamed for Israel's PR woes didn't seem to register with the government honchos.