Graham Platner: It’s Not Just the Nazi Tattoo

Oyster farmer Graham Platner is running in Maine for the Senate as a Democrat, and now that Janet Mills has withdrawn from the primary, Platner is the presumptive candidate. And he has a six-percent lead over the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins. But he has some baggage, including a posting on Reddit that appeared to blame women who are victims of rape for not taking “responsibility” for their own vulnerability: “Holy f**k, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f**ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to? Men and women, you make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self control. So if you don’t want to be in a [compromising] situation, act like an adult for f**k’s sake.”

And then there is the little matter of Platner’s tattoo. In 2007, while in Croatia, Platner chose to be tattooed on his chest with a Totenkopf (death’s head), that was the symbol of the Nazi SS. He now says he was drunk at the time, and had “no idea” what the Totenkopf symbolized. But surely in the nearly twenty years since he got it, he must have found out its significance, yet he made no attempt to cover it over until this year, when it became an issue in the campaign.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner repeatedly praised the tactics used by Hamas terrorists in comments made about a graphic video of a Hamas raid into Israel in 2014, in which terrorists killed at least five Israeli soldiers.

In archived posts from his now-deleted Reddit profile under the username “P-Hustle,” Platner commented on a video post titled “Helmet Footage from Hamas cross-border raid,” which showed the attack on multiple Israeli soldiers.

The original video, also now deleted but still archived, was posted by a YouTube channel called Sabah on July 29, 2014, with the description, “Secret footage shows the storming of a settlement by the Qassam Brigades and the killing of 10 soldiers.” The description and comments in the Reddit thread appear to match a raid by Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades on a military base near Kibbutz Nahal Oz the day prior.

According to a text description of the video and the raid shared online, the video includes footage of the shootings of several Israeli soldiers, at least one of whom is screaming as the terrorists attempt to kidnap him.

“Looks like an all around well executed and successful small unit raid to me,” Platner wrote in 2014 on the Reddit forum r/CombatFootage, a discussion board for footage and photographs of past and current armed conflicts.

 

Responding to another user who criticized the “execution” of the Israeli soldiers and emphasized that the attack would lead to heavy reprisals in Gaza, Platner said he was not interested in discussing the geopolitical or strategic implications, but suggested Hamas’ tactics and actions were reasonable.

“As for your aversion to ‘execution’, a small unit raid tends to be used to inflict casualties and take prisoners in a short period of time,” Platner wrote. “Pragmatically I have little problem with killing an enemy combatant who you attempt to capture but for whatever reason cannot. From a strictly professional standpoint, this was a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent, I dig it.”…

Which is the greatest scandal of the Platner campaign? Is it that Graham Platner had a Nazi SS tattoo on his chest for almost twenty years, and covered it over only after it became an issue in his campaign? Is it that Graham Platner blamed victims of rape for not taking “responsibility” for their own vulnerability? It is neither of those. The greatest scandal of all is that despite his admiration for Hamas killing Israeli soldiers, despite his Nazi SS tattoo, despite his calling for an end to all American military aid to the embattled Jewish state, that the Democratic Party, instead of disavowing him, continues unembarrassedly to support him.