As we reported last week, one fake news narrative blames Antifa, a loosely organized group of anarchists, for last week’s fatal Amtrak train derailment. (It’s pretty clear that the crash had more to do with the fact the train was going 80 mph in a 30 mph zone, a fact that was made public the same day as the accident.)

Antifa gets blamed for many things, like the the Las Vegas massacre and the Texas church shooting, that there’s no evidence they had anything to do with.

Who else is a reliable scapegoat for nearly any tragedy or misfortune, real or imagined? Muslims.

So it’s not surprising that as one meme blamed Antifa for the derailment, another claimed that the FBI had named ‘Muhammad Christopher Blair’ as the saboteur responsible. The meme says Blair “was born in rural Ohio to a Christian woman and a Muslim man she fell in love with who ultimately abandoned his family — but his religion and his hatred of America lived on.”

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‘Muhammad Christopher Blair’ seems to be a swipe at the real-life Christopher Blair, a Maine man with liberal politics whose now-defunct parody site, thelastlineofdefense.org, featured stories that were often picked up by fake news sites which presented them at face value. (This is a tangled web to weave, admittedly.)

Another site included an image of ‘Blair,’ which as several fact-checking sites point out, is actually Shaker Aamer, a Saudi citizen who spent 14 years in Guantanamo.

While all that was happening, another site has claimed that an “illegal Muslim from Iran,” unimaginatively named “Muhummad Islam,” had been arrested for starting the devastating California wildfires. This is an updating of a meme we wrote about in October.

(h/t Snopes, factcheck.org, Politifact)

In fake news news:

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