Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters’ column in the New York Post this morning The New ‘Lepers’ tells of what motivated the New York Times to smear our troops this past Sunday. While “crazed” killers and criminals within the ranks of veterans and current military are few compared to America’s civilian populace, the Times morphed beyond the political as it willfully failed to acknowledge that fact for all this War on Terror:

I’VE had a huge response to Tuesday’s column about The New York Times’ obscene bid to smear veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as mad killers. Countless readers seem to be wondering: Why did the paper do it?

Well, in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.

The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” — as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who’ve served our country — those who’ve won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor) [Editor — Actually, more than 4,000 of our nation’s top six medals for the heroism of our troops have been awarded since 9/11, as I detailed on this web site on October 20, 2007].

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the “sensational” story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder … ).
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The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she’s bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don’t have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don’t want our pity — they want our respect), the Times’ feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who’ve become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.

The hard left’s hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn’t join the Army to fight … READ THE REST.

Without boring you with my full resume, I am also U.S. Army retired and served as a Military Policeman during much of the same period as LTC Peters goes on to describe. Yes, there was crime yet the rates were but a fraction of that of the civilian world. Nearly all served with honor and today’s troops are no different.

Support our troops!