“I JUST advised this smoker this isn’t a place to smoke and she rudely said ‘go report it’,” penned content writer Syed Jaymal Zahiid🌹(@SyedJymalZahiid) on his X account.
“How come your WhatsApp line @KKMPutrajaya (Health Ministry/MOH) is not even active? I can’t even get through to make a complaint. I have her details (including) name, address etc.”
While the Good Samaritan was informed that the complaint address should be “@SIPKKM” instead of @KKMPutrajaya, he soon got in an online scuffle with some netizens who questioned his real motive – whether he truly wanted to be proactive or merely for clickbait.
His defence for his action is that he had only wanted MOH to enforce an existing law while his engagement with the said female smoker is “to show (that) I’m one of millions of Malaysians (who’re) absolutely sick of being told we should be kind and tolerate people like her”.
Some racist remarks also crept into the rebuttal of the Good Samaritan’s action when a netizen claimed that “there are (also) tonnes of smokers in every Malay restaurant” and challenged him to also post his fundings on the X platform as well.
“How convenient of you calling out someone who is minding her own business smoking at the bar and post it to social media. We knew you do it for attention,” lambasted the netizen.
Another netizen fumed at the Good Samaritan for humiliating the woman puffer on social media “just because the MOH reporting line is down”. “You know how vile social media people can be,” she reminded the Good Samaritan.
Again, the Good Samaritan defended his action by justifying that the woman smoker “could have walked three or four steps outward from her table to fulfill her habit”.
One netizen warned the Good Samaritan that the female puffer could take legal action against him for posting her photo. “She’s at a bar. Why are you even near her (alluding to what a Muslim guy is doing in a pub),” wondered the netizen.
Whatever said and done, the Good Samaritan has demonstrated so vividly that ‘citizen arrest’ as in the case of smokers flouting the “No Smoking” law is difficult to practise nor can the issue be identified by race despite the ban on smoking at all restaurants and other eateries – including open-air hawker stalls – having come into effect on Jan 1, 2019.
