Fake News: Muslim Doctor Did NOT Refuse To Save A Christian Man's Life On Flight From New York To Las Vegas

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

There is no truth to the story that a "Dr. Jaleel Kohmeni" refused to save a Christian man's life on a flight from New York to Las Vegas. Several identical articles appeared on various fake news websites making this claim but they were all copies from the same original. Satirical site Daily World Update published the original story (archived here) titled "Muslim Doctor Refuses To Save A Christian Man's Life On Flight From New York To Las Vegas" which opened:

Dr. Jaleel Kohmeni raised his hand when the flight attendant on Delta flight 6978 from New York to Las Vegas asked if there was a doctor on board. He told the attendant that he wasn't an American and that he preferred another doctor help if possible. Unfortunately, he was the man's only hope.

As he approached, he could see that the man was barely managing to breathe and going in and out of consciousness. What the doctor did next may seem normal to people where he comes from, but here it was simply disgusting. He leaned over the man and asked him if he believed in God. "Yes," the man answered, "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior."
At that point, Kohmeni informed the flight attendant that he could only "give the man the comfort of knowing Allah will give him the chance to redeem himself in heaven," but that he couldn't help save him. The attendant reminded him that he was a doctor and that he was in the United States, not Syria.

Note that we kept the link behind the word "answered" pointing to the exact same destination, an image saying "It's cool to love Jesus".

If that didn't tip you off the story did not come from a legitimate news source, how about the disclaimer at the bottom of Daily World Update:

sat·ire ~ˈsaˌtī(ə)r
noun
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, OR ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
If you disagree with the definition of satire or have decided it is synonymous with "comedy," you should really just move along.

The owner and main writer of the site is self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair, a man from Maine who has made it his full time job to troll gullible conservatives and Trump supporters into liking and sharing his articles. He runs several other websites such as asamericanasapplepie.org, ourlandofthefree.com and freedumjunkshun.com. Sometimes he is also known under his nickname "Busta Troll". He has at least one accomplice who writes under the pen names "Freedom", "Captain Jellypants", "Butch Mannington" or "Captain Buck Atlantis".

muslimdoctor.jpg

Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites who often omit the satire disclaimer and any other hints the stories are fake. Blair has tried to get these sites shut down in the past but new ones keep cropping up and he keeps knocking them down.

He has been criticized by several fact checking sites for sometimes using real names in fake stories and for providing easy to copy stories to "real" fake news sites. He responded to these criticism by posting following post on his Facebook page:

If you are wondering, this is the Joshua Gillin article he is refering to.

If you see one of his stories on a site that does not contain a satire disclaimer, assume it is fake news. If you do see the satire disclaimer it is of course also fake news.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Maarten Schenk

Maarten Schenk is the co-founder and COO/CTO of Lead Stories and an expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2018/01/fake-news-muslim-doctor-did-not-refuse-to-save-a-christian-mans-life-on-flight-from-new-york-to-las-.html
leadstories.com
CC-MAIN-2024-26
104740
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KFTCMVBIQZXOIBJV42WIEDFQVHKMACBO
<urn:uuid:b6f2e1c2-b239-4faa-8e22-9a78bfa87e7e>
2024-06-17T04:55:06Z
104.22.29.177
text/html
sha1:OLER7XQXGZNG5XQNCP2STGR3MXJWD2XH
<urn:uuid:3488afdb-7682-45c5-9ee6-1e2ecc7f1ddb>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2018/01/fake-news-muslim-doctor-did-not-refuse-to-save-a-christian-mans-life-on-flight-from-new-york-to-las-.html
response
<urn:uuid:43e0721b-8a25-4295-a2cf-3f4bb780b6ff>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-80
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/