Sunday, January 20, 2008

New York Times attacks the troops

Mark Steyn’s OCRegister column picks up the story of the New York Times’ latest hack job. This time it’s homicidal military vets returning from Iraq and Afstan:

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either "committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one." The "committed a killing" formulation includes car accidents.
[...]
It didn't seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It's not.

Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about one-fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-to-34-year-old American male.

The reality, then, was the opposite of what the NYT tried to portray. Compared to the general population war vets are model citizens. That’s precisely what most reasonable people would expect, isn’t it?

What's going on? Sloppy journalism, anti-military bias, political agenda or all of the above?

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