Despite the fact that the realities of war are talked about
once in a while – if only because their effect is displayed at every turn –
David French continues to exhibit an astonishing inability to incorporate those
realities in his mental processes. He wrote: “Cultural Sensitivity Does Not Win
Wars,” an article that was published on May 8, 2015 in National Review Online.
This is a work that shows to what extent this individual (as
are a few others like him in the English speaking West) is deficient when it
comes to transcending the walls of the sphere in which he operates; and how
incapable he is at looking out the window where the opportunity exists to see
what lies past the walls of the sphere where he maintains himself out of touch
from the people he says he wants to mend fences with.
The gist of the article is that we must not worry about acts
such as the publication of the Mohammed cartoons because this is not what
preoccupies the people of the Middle East . He
adds that he knows from experience what the people of the region want; and he
gives examples of that. This is when you realize that French is living in a
sphere beyond whose walls he cannot see ... because he doesn't want to look and
doesn't want to see.
The proof of this is that David French attacks the arguments
of the people who looked outside their spheres and saw a vast and complex world
out there. Sensitive to what they saw, they transcended the walls of their
enclosures and responded to the world by reaching out to it. To counter those
arguments, and counter the responses to them, David French describes what he
sees inside his own sphere, and concludes that the kind of sensitivity
displayed by the others is not at all necessary.
Among those others is Gregory Aftandjian who is a senior
fellow at the Center for National Policy. He wrote that the publication of the
cartoons alienates “many mainstream Muslims – the very allies we need to
discredit the extremist ideologies of ISIL and al-Qaeda.” And there is Haroon
Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding who said
that the cartoons alienate the American Muslims who report on planned terrorist
attacks. There is also Stephen Kinzer, and “our leaders who compliment Islam at
every opportunity,” and deluge our soldiers “with cultural-training sessions.”
To French, this is a waste of time and effort because: “Our
allies on the ground don't really care about cartoons.” But recalling the
demonstrations that happened in Muslim and non-Muslim countries every time that
a cartoon was published, you wonder where French has been during the past few
decades. And so, you realize that he was imprisoned in his own sphere; the one
beyond whose walls he does not look and does not see.
So you decide you want to know what he sees inside the
sphere. You find it in the article where he tells the story of what happened to
him while serving in Iraq .
He says that one day, he and his comrades met with local police leaders to
discuss the conduct of their operations. The police told them of a terrorist
cell that met in a local mosque where the imam himself was the leader of the
cell. He goes on: “They begged us to raid the mosque but we couldn't do it …
The cell kept meeting and was finally wiped out when our soldiers were ambushed
from the mosque, triggering a firefight that destroyed much of the village.”
The question as to whether it would have been better to
provoke the firefight a day or a week earlier, thus destroy the village that
much earlier, is beside the point. What is relevant about this story is that
David French has finally described his sphere. It is a village that was caught
in the nightmare of the Iraq
war.
Given that the Muslim world comprises more than a billion
and a half people living in a largely peaceful zone that stretches from Mauritania on the Atlantic to Indonesia on the Pacific Rim – not to forget the
millions who live in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas –
David French's vision turns out to be a very narrow one.
Moreover, people caught in a war, think and act in ways that
are different from the way they think and act in peacetime. The problem with
David French, however, seems to be that coming out of the war did not translate
in the war coming out of him. He stayed inside the small sphere, refusing to
see or interact with a world that is not the Iraqi town that suffered the ravages
of war.