Two Iraqi men in their 20s have been convicted of a bloody sex crime in Colorado that left the victim, a woman in her 50s, in need of immediate surgery. Three other Iraqi men, also in their 20s, were convicted on lesser charges as accessories.

All of these men once assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq as informants and interpreters. All received permanent residency status in the U.S., due in part to efforts made by U.S. military members on their behalf.

Most of what the public knows about this comes from The Colorado Springs Gazette. The Gazette has reported that one of Iraqi men used to live with a sergeant and his family on a North Dakota farm. His name is Jasim Ramadon, and he is the central character, known as “Steve-O,” in a war memoir published in 2009 by 1st Sgt. Daniel Hendrex. The book's title is “A Soldier's Promise: The Heroic True Story of an American Soldier and an Iraqi Boy.”

Ramadon is that “Iraqi boy.” Forever young and smiling on the book's cover and once a guest on “Oprah,” Ramadon, The Gazette reported, racked up a record of violent behavior in the U.S. He was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and faces up to life in prison.

Hendrex writes in his book that after Ramadon came to the U.S. in 2004, the teenager lived with Hendrex and his wife in Colorado Springs — a few years later the scene of this crime. But then Ramadon, on the recommendation of a psychologist, went on to live with another family without military connections. Had there been trouble?

In 2012, after Ramadon's arrest, The Gazette sounded a note of disharmony: Hendrex, after he redeployed in 2006, said that because of cultural differences, Ramadon had difficulty being in a house run by a woman. “You had this vision of how you want this to work out, and when I had to go back to Iraq, it really was tough to hear that things weren't going well,” Hendrex told The Gazette.”

It sounds as if young Ramadon had to leave the Hendrex house because he was unable to behave respectfully with the wife of his sponsor, his mentor, his lifesaver. Then again, maybe Ramadon was behaving himself — but according to Islamic teachings that relegate women to inferior status. Call it “cultural differences” vs. “this vision.”

The problem, then, isn't “cultural differences.” The problem is the “vision” that blinds a man like Hendrex to fundamental impasses between Islam and the West over the status of women, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. Such “differences” should have scotched the de facto immigration policy Hendrex and the other unnamed military members made on the fly to launch these five Iraqis in U.S. society.

Immigration policy isn't a buddy movie. Then again, our lawmakers are similarly heedless when setting immigration policy. They are all afflicted with the same “vision.” Islam and the West are interchangeable, this “vision” tells us.

These same visionaries now want the U.S. to admit 20,000 or 30,000 Syrian Muslim refugees. Why not? No one will ever notice the “cultural differences.”

At least, few will talk about them, and even fewer will take them seriously at the national level — regardless of the peril these fundamental religious and cultural impasses pose for peace and freedom inside our borders.

Diana West's new book is “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character” from St. Martin's Press.

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