Ibrahim El-Nour, the founder of the so-called Save the Shisha campaign has an, err, interesting approach to lobbying government. Firstly, he has likened the British government’s recent ban on smoking in enclosed public places to the Iraqi invasion.
Ibrahim El-Nour, a campaigner who called for shisha to be exempt from new anti-smoking laws, goes as far as to say the renewed sense of tension “will have the same impact as the Iraq war.”
He told Al Jazeera: “Arabs see it as an intrusion in their culture, the dismantling of their community venues.”
El-Nour’s Save the Shisha campaign hoped to convince the government that shisha, or hubble-bubble - a water-pipe used to smoke flavoured tobacco – was a cultural alternative to pubs for Muslims who do not drink.
Then, he says that stopping people from smoking shisha in shops would do nothing less than, “destroy a whole community.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, in a letter to a British MP, he also warned that the closure of shisha places would result in Arab children turning to alcohol and drugs. “Their children will be introduced to places where alcohol is consumed as well as drugs,” he wrote.
And then, upping the ante slightly he warns in this video, that shop owners may end up killing themselves as a result of the ban.
2 comments ↓
They chose to ignore the meetings when the law was put together. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Like with the laws in Melbourne that ban it, it does not effect the places that are set up for the smoking of Argileh.
With the laws we have in Melbourne where can’t you smoke now?
Doom! Doom! Doom!
What a drama queen. Suicide, death, cultural destruction, drug abuse by children… he forgot to appeal to the other two great fears of modern man, terrorism and paedophilia.
“By stopping shisha, our youth won’t be able to express themselves politically so they will become suicide bombers.”
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