YouTube prankster Adam Saleh was “definitely racebaiting” when he claimed that he was kicked off of a Delta Airlines flight on Wednesday for speaking Arabic, a fellow passenger is claiming.
And the boyfriend of another man on the London-New York City flight says that Saleh is a “social media whore” who is lying about what happened before he was booted from the Delta airplane.
Saleh claimed in a now-viral video that he and a friend were kicked off of the airplane after he spoke to his mother on the phone in Arabic. The YouTube personality, who has numerous videos of airplane-related hoaxes on his YouTube channel, said that white passengers became outraged after he and his friend continued speaking in Arabic.
Delta issued a statement late Wednesday disputing Saleh’s claims. Saleh and his friend, “Slim” Albaher, released a video later reiterating their story.
But two passengers are disputing the claims about Saleh’s phone call and about speaking in Arabic.
“I was sat two seats away from the internet prankster and his friend. Neither of them was on any phone call I could hear them talking in plain American English,” a man named Anthony who claims he was two rows away from Saleh wrote on Reddit.
As evidence that he was on the flight, Anthony published a photo of his Delta boarding pass. The photo shows Anthony’s first name, though his last name is blocked out. A Delta Airlines spokesman told The Daily Caller that the document appears to be authentic and that Anthony’s seat, 36E, indeed was “in the vicinity” of Saleh’s.
Anthony says that Saleh told his friend, who goes by the name “Slim,” “to shout something in Arabic which he did a total of 4 times.”
After Slim shouted, a couple of other passengers told the Muslim men that they were making them and their children uncomfortable and asked “could they shut up.”
“They told her to shut up and then he shouted it again and her husband started saying it to them,” wrote Anthony, who claims he is biracial and has attended Arabic weddings.
Anthony also said that Saleh was filming passengers’ reactions to their outburst but were made to delete it by a Delta flight attendant.
“I literally watched him egging his friend on to shout out across the aeroplane, even after they were asked politely to stop they carried on and told people to shut their mouths,” Anthony said in response to questions from other Reddit users. “It was only when several people got up and the stewards came over they started saying it was racism, he was definately [sic] racebaiting.”
Anthony also claimed that another woman on the plane was speaking Arabic but that “no-one said a word to her.”
Anthony’s account closely matches that of Roderick Edens, a man who says that his boyfriend was sitting near Saleh on the flight.
“The entire thing was planned,” wrote Edens, who posted a photo of what he says was his boyfriend’s boarding pass.
The pass shows he was sitting in seat 37G.
“He wasn’t on the phone with his mom speaking Arabic. He and his friends were shouting in Arabic with their fists balled up in the air,” Edens says his boyfriend claimed.
“They were removed from the plane for being loud and disruptive….then started filming claiming they were victims. These guys aren’t victims….they are social media whores.”
Saleh has been behind numerous pranks, many of which involve airplane flights and allegations of racial profiling.
His YouTube channel shows videos with titles such as “PULLING OFF HIJAB EXPERIMENT” and “ARABS ON A PLANE” in which Saleh and Albaher dress up in traditional Arabic garb.
Last week, Saleh staged a prank in which he claimed that he took a flight from New Zealand inside of a suitcase.
In 2014, Saleh and another friend were forced to apologize after The Smoking Gun exposed that they lied in a video about being racially profiled by the NYPD. The video from that hoax was viewed on YouTube more than 60 million times, generating significant revenue for Saleh.
Saleh’s latest incident closely matches claims he made in another video posted last year entitled “RACIST MAN ON PLANE! DAY BEFORE 9/11!!”
WATCH (at 7:00):
In that video, Saleh claimed that in a flight, also from London to New York, he was forced to confront a drunk white man who he says told a Muslim woman wearing a hijab that she was “terrifying.” Saleh gave an elaborate — if not far-fetched — account of the incident while also claiming that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job.”
Saleh said that he confronted the man and threatened to punch him in the face after he said that he was “actually pretty nervous that I’m sitting behind this woman.”
The YouTuber went on to claim in that video that his mother had rocks thrown at her after the 9/11 attacks.
“And the funny thing is that everyone knows that it was an inside job but you’re too ignorant to know that,” Saleh said of the 9/11 attacks.