Arnaud Beltrame a symbol of hope against Islamist evil

Illustration: Sturt Krygsman

As Christians celebrate Easter and Jews prepare for Passover, we should remember Arnaud Beltrame, the 44-year-old lieutenant-colonel in the French National Gendamerie killed, along with three other victims, by Radouane Lakdim, an Islamist terrorist who took hostages last Friday in a supermarket in the small southwestern town of Trebes.

Beltrame had offered himself in exchange for a woman Lakdim was holding as a human shield. His was no rash act or spur-of-the-moment response to a threat. On the contrary, having seen the CCTV footage, he knew Lakdim, who was heavily armed, had already shot two people. A graduate of France’s premier military academy and a former paratrooper who had served in Iraq, Beltrame would have had no illusions about his prospects.

What he thought as he put down his weapon and walked into the supermarket we will never know. What we do know, however, is that — in the words of John Manifold’s magnificent lament for Lieutenant John Learmonth of the AIF, killed on the hills of Crete in World War II — his was that “courage chemically pure, uncrossed / With sacrifice or duty or career / Which counts and pays in ready coin the cost / Of holding course”.

Yet it would be wrong to view it solely as a matter of courage. Rather, there was also, in Beltrame’s action, the ultimate form of generosity: giving up one’s own life so that others may live.

And because it is generosity, the fellow feeling rooted in our common humanity, that makes the social world possible, the Talmud tells us that “whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world”.

I have no reason to believe Beltrame was familiar with the Talmudic injunction. But, equally, I do not believe it is a mere coincidence that he had recently renewed his faith.

Born into a family that had little time for religion, he had moved to the south of France to marry a veterinarian; having had the civil ceremony, he and his wife were preparing for a church wedding in June. In the event, the priest who was guiding their religious instruction, and to whom he had become close, administered the last rites as he lay dying.

To say that is not to deny that Lakdim would also consider himself a man of faith. A petty criminal who associated with other petty criminals, he was on a police watch list as at high risk of Islamist radicalisation; but with about 20,000 names on the list, his activities could scarcely be carefully monitored.

Left to do as he pleased, he came under the influence of Salafism and its online preachers. Far from affirming the sanctity of life — a sanctity founded, in the Abrahamic religions, in the fact we are made in God’s image — they exalted death and, in the name of purifying the world, glorified the massacre of unbelievers. Lakdim therefore did not merely kill Beltrame; he slashed his throat, re-enacting, in a grizzly human sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of sheep at Eid al-Adha.

He was not, of course, the first to revive Islam’s encounter with human sacrifice. In the notes found among his effects at Boston airport, Mohammed Atta, who led the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, detailed in Arabic for his personal use the rites to perform for the greater glory of God as the attack unfolded, including slaughtering the flight attendants “as if (they were) sheep”.

Nor was Lakdim alone in believing that butchering innocents would unlock the gates of paradise. On the same day as Lakdim’s assault on the supermarket, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed to death in the bed of her Paris apartment in what police are treating as an anti-Semitic attack with Islamist overtones.

Her death is just the latest in a long string of incidents that includes the murder of Knoll’s neighbour Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman thrown off a balcony to triumphant cries of “Allahu akbar”.

As usual, world leaders have been unanimous in their condemnation and in their calls for greater understanding.

But under­standing cannot mean ignoring the reality of evil, much less disguising it behind generalities that merely serve to cloud the still growing severity of the Islamist threat.

Rather, what the situation demands is the courage to see, and say, things as they really are, neither denying their existence nor meekly submitting to their horrors.

Which brings me back to Beltrame. Of all the virtues, courage was the only one the ancient Greeks’ immortal gods left entirely to ordinary mortals. The gods lived forever; as a result, even in their most earth-shattering battles, the stakes were always lower than those facing mere men, who could lose their lives. So while the gods were able to shine in every other respect, they could never be tested in the bravery required to face death.

But precisely because human lives end, and great actions might die with them, the gods also bestowed mortals with remembrance, the retelling of past deeds, thus granting them permanence in the enduring chronicle of mankind.

For Homer, a hero was therefore no more than a free man about whom such a story could be told — and whose deeds could in that way be preserved from oblivion and futility.

In that chronicle, Beltrame has more than earned his place. His courage and generosity won’t stop the madness, or give our democracies the backbone required to confront radical Islam.

But at this time when we celebrate new life, they remind us that for all the evil that surrounds us, good also walks on the earth; and so long as it does, hope will walk with it.