Libya Now Victim of ““Waterpipe””™ Contamination. Another Twist of the “Bulgarian Nurses” Series ?

“But the research community’s need for a unifying term should not be debatable and waterpipe seems to be the most appropriate, till a better term is evolved.”

Source: Dr Sebastian THOMAS, Lecturer, Al Fateh University Dental School, Tripoli (Libya)

Background: This neo-orientalist new “expert” who wants to ban scientific discussion on a highly controversial terminology also mentioned earlier a supposedly “raging controversy” over the health effects of shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking. However, as he hasn’t revealed between whom and whom the so-called “raging controversy” has been taking place, our friend wrote to him . He reminded him that there hasn’t been any debate on any question regarding these issues. Instead, what the world has been witnessing for more than 5 years now is censorship of opposed scientific views and brainwashing of lay people.

This new “expert” (the more they are the greater the public health catastrophe will be...) is not ashamed of citing highly erroneous or controversial publications (Maziak, Knishkowy, Shihadeh, etc.) as if they were Biblical references. He may have thought that the “peer-reviewed” label was enough. In fact “Peer-review” in the field of shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking has collapsed (browse this site if you still are doubtful). In other words, publishing a paper in a hegemonic journal (like Tobacco Control for instance) is not a guarantee of scientific accurateness and independence !

““Waterpipe”” ™ is a dangerous nominalism for the world public health! It has produced the biggest confusion in the field of hookah (shisha, narghile) studies. Let’s remind oblivious people how. Such a ludicrous nominalism (see Letter to Dir. WHO) has led the great majority of researchers to take one pipe for another, one product for the other, etc. The scenario is always the same. A team of “researchers” publishes a paper in which they happily cite studies on ““Waterpipe”” ™ carried on -let's say...- in China, Yemen or India or any other part of the world. However, they don’t tell anybody that the ““Waterpipe”” ™ there is completely different from the shisha in their own country (USA or Europe for instance). They don’t say (simply because they don’t understand the whole thing) that the smoking product (and, hence, the chemistry of smoke) is different (or simultaneously used with others), etc. No, they state that smoking out of a ““Waterpipe”” ™ causes all kinds of cancer (lung, stomach, etc.) because the cited studies would have established this fact. This is not science. This is reductionism and a caricature of complexity. Beyond, this becomes global obscurantism.

A long list of misled authors of publications on this issue could be drawn right now. Just have a look at a striking example here . Even official “experts” who were appointed by WHO (the World Health Organization) to prepare reports on hookah (narghile, shisha, ““waterpipe””™) smoking could not distinguish between a burning and a heating process (1st Erroneous Report), between smoking products (2nd Erroneous Report) and even between hookah and cigarette smoke (American Lung Association Erroneous Report French INPES Experts Campaign)... And, recently in France, ""top" "experts"" take a Shish-Kebab for a Shisha ...

Even Dr Sebastian THOMAS, the new ““waterpipe””™ “expert” from Libya, talks of reverse smoking without realizing that this is totally irrelevant in the case of shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking. This is because he refers (wrongly, from a bibliographical viewpoint) to a study in India (firstly cited by us) about the influence of temperatures on tar carcinogenicity. However, this has nothing to do with hookah (shisha, narghile) smoking.

It described another type of smoking in India. Indeed, do shisha smokers put the bowl of tobamel in their mouth to inhale its smoke ? Apart from this, none of the teams who authored the biased publications defended by Dr Sebastian THOMAS paid the least attention to the importance of temperatures. We were the first (Year 2000) to emphasize their central role (notably by mentioning the Maillard reaction for instance). All these matters were considered as taboo.

Let’s repeat: for many reasons, the word Shisha is now used everywhere in the world. Professor Al-BELASY, son of a café owner in Egypt (and author of a study on shisha in which he shows that he perfectly knows what he is talking about), has also insisted on this aspect. However, his opinion was not taken into account because he is not a member of the [““waterpipe””™] club behind the WHO publications. In the Indian subcontinent, the word used for centuries has been 'hookah'. However, hookah has been used mainly for tumbâk, jurâk and similar products. Shisha is the new device adapted for tobamel, the fashionable tobacco (or tobacco-free)-molasses based smoking mixture that is swamping the world. There are different kind of devices and smoking mixtures used at the same time and, most important, the chemistry of smoke is different in each case. So, ““waterpipe””™ is highly confusing. In Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and many other languages, the word ““waterpipe””™ simply has no existence.

Such a nominalism is all the more curious that the world “experts” and this newbie in Libya are not studying the Indian hookah (with pure tobacco or a kind of jurâk) but are all concerned (perhaps more by questions in relation to funding than to public health) by the same product: tobamel, the tobacco (or tobacco-free)-molasses based product that is smoked in a shisha. In India, for instance, local people make a clear distinction between the hookah (mainly used with pure tobacco) and the newly-arrived shisha which is used with the tobamel. The same in Yemen where the local narghile, called Madâ‘a, is one thing and the Shisha another one. Do we have to give other examples from many other parts of the world ? For a poor man of these countries, it is as clear as the sun. For these highly paid official and stubborn “experts”, it is not.

““Waterpipe””™ is a Code ! Our attention was drawn these last years by some independent researchers who didn’t maintain any special relations with the global “anti”-Tobacco machine (WHO, the Globalink network, the Tobacco Control and Nicotine and Tobacco Research journals and the whole series of tobacco IGOs and NGOs)[note that the latter are not separate entitites but depend on the decisions of a handful of known influent people, so you can get a picture of this democratic system..]. Our friends were therefore interested in the topic and were planning to submit a manuscript to so-called “peer-reviewed” journals (of course controlled by the above). They were surprised to be soon urged to use the ““waterpipe””™ trademark even when they insisted (some of them were of Lebanese and Egyptian descent) that the words (n)arghile, shisha and goza were the ones used in their respective native countries, those their studies focussed on. They understood that this was the condition for their papers to be “considered” for publication. Otherwise, they would be rejected, a priori. You see, what « peer-reviewers » of these journals are checking is not the serious errors or the flaws in a manuscript but the vocabulary used by their authors. This is a code, a police code. Accepting this code means that you will become a “member of the Club” (not to say other ugly words…). Anyway, the above researchers were generally deceived and some of them told us they were literally shocked by these unethical practices in science.

CONCLUSION
The aim of the “not debatable” use of ““waterpipe””™ is to let ignorant people accept biased models for shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking: for instance that of a crazy unrealistic smoking machine in a laboratory of a US-American University in Beirut. They don’t want to work with real smokers because they know that the reality of shisha (smoking) will show that their fear-arousing slogans (1 narghile Equals 200 Cigarettes, etc.) are wrong.

As a conclusion, ““waterpipe””™ is not an innocent and “useful” word. It is a registered trademark (that of a clan, of researchers, of journals, of funding organizations) to maintain ignorance, fear, confusion, to get more funds for more biased studies. This is another facet of the Neo-Orientalist epidemic. We reached the point that a desperate researcher said [European] “colonialism” was the cause of the scourge (see here)... Now, our new “expert” in Libya tells you that you cannot put into question the confusing pseudo-scientific terminology of his affiliated clan. Some of these Western researchers are based in countries like Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and now Libya. They naively believe that they will benefit from a moral protection when they publish such ludicrous statements.

Question: What does Dr Sebastian THOMAS teach in his university of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (the official name of Lybia. Note that in Arabic, this means the Government of the Masses and by the Masses) ? Is this the kind of democracy he is bringing from the West to Libya ? Urging people not to discuss granted truths ? Urging young Libyan researchers not to put into question a pseudo-scientific terminology forged outside their country (where, by the way, the only word known is Shisha) ?

Didn’t Dr Sebastian THOMAS learn there that any question can be debated in the framework of the Popular Committees ? Didn’t he read the Green Book authored by the Leader of the country in which he works as a lecturer ?

We believed he was simply doing tourism there. However, after we read the following: “Till then, I am sure the researchers involved will have the discretion to differentiate waterpipe with the household plumbing equipment terminology just like ‘AIDS’ is differently comprehended from ‘aids’- '3rd person present singular' of the word ‘aid’”

we just wondered: What is all this mess about ? Another twist of the “Bulgarian Nurses” series ?

Picture: Courtesy of Arikah

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