Critique of the article published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, dated May-Jun 2010 (Vol 34, issue 3, pages 275-85), available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20001185

Errors, biases, lies and tricks in connection with: “realistic” smoking; tar and its mysterious composition; nicotine-addiction; carbon monoxide; radioactivity; cancer; environmental tobacco smoke; gateway hypothesis; origins; publication bias; xenophobic bias; biomedical neo-orientalism; etc. [a provisional first draft]

The International Journal of Cancer (IJC) has recently published an article on hookah smoking and cancer (authored by researchers of the US funded antismoking Syrian Centre for Tobacco Studies – US-SCTS); a critique of that paper on our behalf and, finally: a response to the latter by the original authors. IJC Editors were then confronted with the fact that, among other serious errors, the US-SCTS authors had succeeded in slipping in a huge lie regarding their de facto attendance to the last world antismoking conference in Bombay (India, March 2009). The Editors considered that pursuing the discussion is not “of general interest” and that it is not their “task” to investigate our statement concerning this lie. We have therefore decided to expose such an unethical behaviour in the form of a Knol so that readers can contemplate the methods used by antismoking researchers in general and ““waterpipe”” ones in particular. In the conclusion of this Knol, we take the opportunity to suggest guidelines for sound research on hookah (shisha, narghile, “water pipe”) smoking and cancer. Unless Dr Ala-Eddin AL-MOUSTAFA and his colleagues publish an official apology in a relevant support, we have no reason to remove this article.