Biomedical Fitna in the Eyes of Little Red Riding Hood. Neo-Orientalism, Symbolic Violence and Intolerance in Research on Narghile (Hookah, Shisha)

Communiqué in the form of a Tale (!):

Little Red Riding Hood’s Narghile (2 April 2008)

Subtitle: A Pleasure Among Friends: How Narghile (““waterpipe””) Smoking… Keeps Researchers in Wonderland, Obsessing all Prohibitionists of the World and Has Come to Be Their Bête Noire…

[Le narguilé du Petit Chaperon Rouge : French][Caperucita Roja y Su Narguile : Spanish]

SUBJECT: A critical analysis of a story written by the joint US-Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies [1]. Authored by Fouad HAMMAL, Jeremiah MOCK, Kenneth WARD, Thomas EISSENBERG, Wasim MAZIAK.

Title: “A pleasure among friends: how narghile (waterpipe) smoking differs from cigarette smoking in Syria”. Supposedly “peer-reviewed” and published in the Tobacco Control journal .

FUNDING: “US Public Health Service Grants TW05962, TW07233 and Initiative for Cardiovascular Health Research in the Developing Countries (IC-Health)” [The latter is funded by the Rockfeller Foundation, the World Bank and WHO… Most of its member organisations are of US obedience].

EXCERPTS:

>LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD replied to the WOLF: May I suggest to also ban Hummus (all vegetarians of the world are mad for it) and Tabuleh…

>LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD suddenly realised that her GRANDMOTHER was LYING. She said in a provocative way: 7 years of “studies claiming that 1 narghile equals 200 to 40 cigarettes and without paying the least attention to the context and now you pretend to be a professional socio-cultural anthropologist…

Grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have !

Contains also a discussion on the ““waterpipe””™ global fraud: “The two hegemonic journals in the field of tobacco issues (Tobacco Control and Nicotine and Tobacco Research impose to authors, for obvious purposes, the use of this clannish unscientific nominalist and reductionist
neologism.”

CALL: Syrians of all countries, unite against public health foreign interventions based on pseudo-science !


Image: courtesy of Mon enfant

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