Another Times hit job against reality

Black and Hispanic violent crime barely exists in the pages of the New York Times, let alone black and Hispanic violent crime committed against whites. But guess what fascinating category of crime Times reporters Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez have expended great efforts digging up? Murders by veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Searching through crime records for the entire United States, Sontag and Alvarez found 121 cases over the last six years in which returning veterans committed or were charged with committing a homicide. In the resulting 6,200 word long article, entitled “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles,” they speak of “a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

However, as John of Powerline points out, the Times in uncovering this supposed epidemic of murder by former U.S. servicemen fails to compare their rate of murder with that of the population of young U.S. males as a whole. The latter is 27 per 100,000 per year. John estimates that the murder rate among returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is 3 per 100,000 per year, one ninth the rate of young men generally. Veterans are vastly less likely to commit murder than other young men, but the Times singles out veterans as uniquely pathological and dangerous.

A telling symmetry emerges, illustrating Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society (see this and this.). The last I looked, blacks commit murder at a per capita rate about eight times that of whites, a fact never, ever mentioned in the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream liberal media. Returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them white, commit murder at about one ninth the rate of young U.S. men as a whole, and that becomes the occasion for an epic length Times article about a “cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.” Based on the liberal principle that all human beings are of equal worth and must be seen as being of equal worth, the more dangerous the behavior of nonwhite and non-Western groups, the more their misbehavior is concealed and excused, while the better the behavior of the majority group, or of any group that represents society’s basic institutions, like the military, the more that group must be demonized. In a perversion of reality that stems directly from the liberal belief in equality, the worse something is, and the more alien and threatening to society, the more the liberals love it, while the better something is, and the more fundamental and helpful to society, the more the liberals hate it.

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Stephen T. writes:

Here are the current 10 most wanted violent criminals in Los Angeles, at the LAPD website. Notice any recurrent theme?

David B. writes:

The war veteran as criminal is a long-time favorite obsession of the MSM, and also “popular culture.” During the 1970’s, cop shows were all over prime-time TV. The standard villain of these shows was a psycho white Vietnam veteran. Motion pictures were much the same. In two of the first three Dirty Harry movies (Magnum Force, The Enforcer), the bad guys were Vietnam veterans. The press, both print and electronic, played up “crazy vet kills” stories as much as possible. The New York Times is updating it to the present. It is a way of avoiding the truth about who most often commits crime.

Many of the Vietnam veteran criminals turned out to be bogus. The criminal would claim to be a Vietnam veteran in order to claim to be “messed up.” Others had been in the military, but were not in Vietnam. The Joseph Yandle case in Boston in 1972 is an example. See the book, Stolen Valor.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 14, 2008 01:45 PM | Send