The utter futility of jihadi terror ... in a photo

WE’LL probably never know his name. We can’t even see his face clearly. All we can really see is one of his hands, gloved and bloodied and holding an oxygen tube into the mouth of the London attacker, while the other hand rests gently on the man’s forehead in a gesture of comfort and reassurance.

Around him, other first responders work on the man’s chest, vainly trying to counteract the effect of the bullets fired into his body by their colleagues in the police force just a few minutes earlier. The dying man’s eyes are rolled back in his head and so the last face he sees is the one we can’t, and probably never will: the face of the paramedic who is trying to save his life.

If he had time for a last thought, as he lay dying in the unstinting care of complete strangers, you can’t help wondering if the London attacker suffered any crisis of certainty about the mission that was about to cost his life. He had just ploughed a hired car into other complete strangers, defenceless and unsuspecting people going about their ordinary business on a peaceful city street. He had stabbed to death an unarmed policeman who had never done him the slightest harm, and tried to kill a second man. And yet in the final moments of his life he saw no hate in the faces that surrounded him, only concern. He saw that he had failed to make them vengeful, only compassionate. And he knew that he drew his last breath, not at the will of whatever twisted deity he believed he was serving with his death, but with the help of caring strangers urging him to live.

If any photograph ever captured the inevitable futility of the jihadis’ wicked campaign, it was that picture of the dying murderer being tended with as much tenderness and urgency as any of his victims. We live at a time of alarmingly nationalistic hyperbole, when all of the big powers are bullishly claiming to be the greatest and the strongest and the best. In that context, then, London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s declaration this week that his was the greatest city in the world might be dismissed as yet another salvo in that escalating rivalry. But looking at that picture, in those circumstances, it’s hard to dispute the profound civility, decency and evolved humanity that it represents.

You really couldn’t have blamed those paramedics if they’d taken their time about attending to the killer, who had just been shot by police before he could continue his murderous rampage. I remember talking to one of the first responders in Dunblane, more than 20 years ago, one of the first people into the gym where Thomas Hamilton had slaughtered most of his young victims. He recalled seeing Hamilton’s body slumped against the wall where he’d shot himself after wiping out an entire class of five- and six-year-olds. The urge to kick his corpse, he said, was strong, but he didn’t. Instead he covered it respectfully, picked it up and helped to carry it to a hearse. And here’s the quality that separates civilised people from the savages who would destroy them: had Hamilton survived his wounds, he’d have been rushed to hospital and given the best of care and nursed back to health, just as the London attacker would have been nursed and treated.

BECAUSE civilisation fundamentally respects all human life and tries to protect and nurture and enhance it. But the primitive, apocalyptic cults of death, which really don’t deserve to be dignified with the term ‘religions’, despise life, and envy freedom, joy, and gaiety so much that their crazed adherents will sacrifice themselves to deny those gifts to others.

The unidentified paramedic would probably argue he’d simply done what anyone would do. Not so: the man he’s tending would have killed him in a heartbeat. But he’s doing what civilised people, in one of the world’s most civilised cities, take for granted as their human duty. And that’s what makes him remarkably unremarkable, and is also the reason why we’ll never even know his name.