Desperately Seeking Supremacists | Power Line

Desperately Seeking Supremacists | Power Line
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUPREMACISTS

Tania Lavin is (or was, at last word) a fact-checker for the New Yorker. 
She achieved overnight Twitter-fame by accusing an ICE agent of being a white supremacist. The New York Post has the story:

A Harvard-educated fact-checker for the New Yorker is being excoriated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for “baselessly slandering” a Marine veteran — by falsely accusing him of having a Nazi tattoo, according to reports.

Officials with ICE are now demanding that the New Yorker and Talia Lavin apologize over her erroneous tweet about Justin Gaertner.

In the gaffe, Lavin allegedly implied over the weekend that Gaertner, a combat-wounded veteran and ICE forensics analyst, had the Nazis’ Iron Cross inked on his elbow.

But she deleted her post after “military veterans responded that the tattoo looked more like a Maltese cross, a symbol associated with firefighters,” ICE said in a statement.

The tattoo, according to Gaertner, is actually a “Titan 2” symbol for his platoon when he served in Afghanistan.

This is the photo:

As you can see from the picture, Justin Gaertner is a double amputee:

Gaertner lost both of his legs and suffered other permanent injuries when an IED exploded during his deployment to Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He served as a fire team leader and lead sweeper for IEDs.

Now Gaertner is a para-Olympic athlete who has “volunteered his time to motivate other wounded warriors and Boston bombing victims,” according to ICE. With the immigration agency, he helps solve criminal cases related to sexually abused children.

An obvious question is, what on God’s green Earth would cause anyone to think that the vaguely cross-like symbol on Gaertner’s elbow is a Nazi or white supremacist sign? Only a person far gone in hatred for ICE employees would leap to such an irrational conclusion..."

Read on!