Maine progressive Senate candidate Graham Platner questioned whether the mass-killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century “was in fact genocide” in a now-deleted 2016 Reddit comment.The revelation of the post, first by the Washington Free Beacon on Friday, came amid national scrutiny into Platner’s past comments on social media. In other posts, Platner mocked an American soldier shot four times during a Taliban firefight as a “fat a**” who “didn’t deserve to live” and recalled his experience masturbating in a public toilet while deployed to Afghanistan.In the 2016 post, Platner wrote that Turkey “fully admits the incident happened” and that “the issue” is whether it was a genocide or a “mass killing/displacement during wartime.” “I’m no fan of Turkey,” Platner said. “But it’s important to get the facts straight.”
Yet Turkey’s attitude toward the event is more ambiguous than the oyster farmer and self-styled populist made it out to be. Ankara’s official view, as outlined by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, is that the Armenian view of history “selects the Armenian suffering, embellishes it in several ways and presents it as a genocide—a crime defined in international law—perpetrated by Turks against Armenians.”
