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