Left-wing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner—who’s repeatedly accused Israel of genocide—publicly questioned the Armenian genocide in a now-deleted internet post, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
In a June 2016 posting to Reddit, Platner responded to a thread about Germany formally recognizing the Armenian genocide, suggesting the widely accepted mass slaughter of Armenians during World War I was more complicated.
"The problem with your statement is that Turkey fully admits the Incident happened, the issue is whether it was in fact genocide or if it was mass killing/displacement," Platner opined.
"I’m no fan of Turkey, but it’s important to get the facts straight."
Up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide in 1915 and 1916, when the Ottoman Empire carried out systematic mass murder and deportation of the Armenian people. In recent decades, the Turkish government has furiously denied the genocide and used diplomatic pressure in attempts to rewrite history and keep other countries from acknowledging the atrocities.
Platner's post prompted criticism from an Armenian human rights activist in Maine, Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, who called Platner "anti-Armenian" and said his stance on the genocide would hurt him with Armenian-Americans in the state.
"There has been denial of the Armenian genocide for over 100 years … He's not getting my vote," Turcotte told the Free Beacon. "I don't think he's going to do very well with Armenian voters in Maine."
Platner’s nuanced approach to the Armenian "incident" contrasts sharply with his repeated and false claims that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
"I said on the day of our campaign's launch that the genocide in Gaza is the moral test of our time," Platner offered in a statement on the two-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel which left more than 1,200 dead. Platner had additionally called the United States "complicit" in the "genocide" and has condemned U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Historians have cited the Turks’ skillful 1920s and '30s erasure and denial of the Armenian genocide as paving the way for the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler said in 1939 as Germany’s mass murders of Jews were beginning to accelerate—in a quote which now hangs in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
In addition to Platner's Reddit post, Turcotte criticized his January rally with Deqa Dhalac, a far-left Somali-born state representative tied to a nonprofit under congressional investigation for allegedly defrauding the state of millions of dollars in Medicaid payments. Dhalac has been criticized for her close ties to Tarlan Ahmadov, an Azerbaijani-born former Maine state official who resigned following allegations that he harbored anti-Armenian sentiment. Dhalac went on a junket organized by Ahmadov to Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested part of Azerbaijan whose original Armenian Christian population has long been brutalized by Azerbaijani Muslims.
Raising awareness of the genocide has long been a major issue for the United States’ small but influential Armenian community. In August 2019 Kim and Kourtney Kardashian and their families visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, and have remained consistently outspoken on the issue. In 2021 President Joe Biden became the first U.S. leader to recognize the Armenian genocide, infuriating Turkey.
