A week of evil in which humanity triumphed
AMID the scenes of horror as 132 Pakistani schoolchildren were slaughtered by fanatics, there was also a ray of hope for humanity. One young female teacher stood firm. Afsha Ahmed, 24, confronted the gunmen when they stormed into her classroom and refused to let them past, saying: ‘You must kill me first because I will not see my students’ bodies lying in front of me.’
The monsters responded by pouring petrol over her and setting her alight. Yet even with her dying breath her thoughts were still with the children, urging them to flee to safety.
Such self-sacrifice in the face of pure evil is awe-inspiring.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, two others similarly sacrificed their lives after a crazed gunman held a Sydney coffee shop to siege.
Café manager Tori Johnson, 34, was blasted to death when he tried to wrestle the gun away from self-styled cleric Man Haron Monis, while mother- of-three Katrina Dawson died shielding her pregnant friend from the blasts.
Such stories should give us pause to wonder what we would do if, God forbid, we ever found ourselves in a similar situation. Would we show the same exceptional courage of these three?
It’s easy to think it’ll never happen to us. But as the head of the Metropolitan Police Bernard Hogan-Howe warned this week, the threat of terrorism on our own doorstep is all too real.
Security services have mercifully foiled four or five terrorist plots in the UK in the past four months alone — one of which brought us to ‘within days’ of a Sydney-style siege.
One day we may not be so lucky. Both individually and as a nation, we must ask ourselves if we’re prepared to face up to such terror with the same determination and instinctive goodness those heroes showed in Pakistan and Australia.
Theirs was a triumph of the human spirit. For while every instinct in us may cry out for revenge and bloody reprisals against the fanatics who are spreading terror to every corner of the globe, we must never stoop to their level of inhumanity. Our liberal values and democratic freedoms are what they detest most — and they are also what set us apart.
That is what makes the torture of detainees by the CIA — and Britain’s suspected complicity in it — so despicable. It reduced us to the level of the savages who seek to destroy us.
Yes, the free world must unite to remove the Taliban, IS and all terrorists from the face of the earth. But we must also hold dear the words of Mohammad Yassin, a 16-year-old schoolboy who saw his two closest friends gunned down in the Peshawar massacre: ‘We are a nation of great beauty and grief. Our smile is much stronger than your gun.’