NYT Targets Our Troops Again...This Time At Home

Ralph Peters obliterates a New York Times article that portrays our troops as bloodthirsty killers.  It's been months since the NYT has had a juicy piece of bad news from Iraq, so now they're taking aim at veterans here at home.  The NYT reports that former Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have committed 121 murders since they've been discharged, and implies there are many other incidents that have gone unreported.  The story was front-page news which spilled onto three more pages.  It was major stuff.

Unfortunately, it was almost entirely wrong, and it was completely misleading.  Par for the course for the New York Times.

Says Peters:

The Times did get one basic fact right: Returning vets committed or are charged with 121 murders in the United States since our current wars began.  Had the Times' "journalists" and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would've found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.

He explains with some facts, which the NYT seems anxious to leave out:

A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that's not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).

Now consider the Justice Department's numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would've had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.

In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.

He then tells you exactly how to find the information he is citing over the Internet and encourages people to check it out for themselves.  In the process of that research, he also came up with this gem:

Know what else you'll learn? In 2005 alone, 8,718 young Americans from the same age group were murdered in this country. That's well over twice as many as the number of troops killed in all our foreign missions since 2001. Maybe military service not only prevents you from committing crimes, but also keeps you alive?

And this one:

Want more numbers? In the District of Columbia, our nation's capital, the murder rate for the 18-34 group was about 14 times higher than the rate of murders allegedly committed by returning vets.

And that actually understates the District's problem, since many DC-related murders spill across into Prince George's County (another Democratic Party stronghold).

In DC, an 18-34 population half the size of the total number of troops who've served in our wars overseas committed the lion's share of 992 murders between 2003 and 2007 - the years mourned by the Times as proving that our veterans are psychotic killers.

[I feel obligated to interject here that DC's ban on guns is more than likely one reason the murder rate is so high there.  Anyway, moving on...]  Peters predicts that the election cycle is only going to make the NYT go farther and farther left once again:

Those on the left will never accept that the finest young Americans are those who risk their lives defending freedom. Sen. John Kerry summed up the views of the left perfectly when he disparaged our troops as too stupid to do anything but sling hamburgers.

And The New York Times will never forgive our men and women in uniform for their infuriating successes in Iraq.

The best way to uncover and combat such blatant anti-American hypocrisy and deceit is with hard facts, and that's exactly what Ralph Peters does here.  Keep in mind the fact that the NYT is something of a centerpiece in the traditional MSM, and many other 'news' outlets take their cues from it.  But, as we've seen over the past few years, the NYT (and others) is hemorrhaging money and personnel, so the American public has clearly begun to figure out that there's a difference between news ( i.e. facts) and opinion (the hate-filled trash the NYT usually spews).  Personally, I wonder how long it will be before the NYT goes completely under - at this rate, it shouldn't be more than a few more years! 

Anyway, as we get further into this election cycle, take everything you read with a monster-sized grain of salt.  This article is a perfect example of why.

There's my two cents.