Captains are expected to get everybody else off a sinking ship before worrying about themselves. But the code of nautical chivalry does not require civilian skippers to steer their way into gunfire to save vulnerable lives, as the man in charge of one Tunisian boat off Sousse did on Friday.
Nor is the captain’s code normally assumed to extend to hoteliers. But as tourists fled Seifeddine Rezgui’s bullets, they found staff “running towards the beach when we were running away”. Local medics, too, displayed extraordinary bravery, with ambulances sent in to the site of the massacre before the police had arrived to stop it.
Tunisia’s prosperity is now threatened, because of the shadow one madman has cast across its reputation as a holiday paradise. The terrorists’ version of Islam is a twisted distortion. Real Islam stresses hospitality. Tunisians have shown what that looks like when it is fortified with courage.
