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In response to the murder outside a synagogue in Manchester by a man of Syrian origin, grateful to live in the free society, the British Medical Association put out a statement in which it said, inter alia:

The BMA is appalled by the horrific attack on a synagogue in Manchester. For such an attack to take place on Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, makes this atrocity all the more sickening.

This has the corollary that the attack would have been less sickening, not quite as bad, if it had been perpetrated a week before Yom Kippur, say, or a week afterward.

And this, unfortunately, is typical of the way drafters of official statements these days pay little attention to wording and think that the expression of decent sentiment is enough. Why bother with the corollary of what you say once you have demonstrated your decency to your own satisfaction?

“Murder is wrong because it is murder, not because the wrong person was killed.”

There is an obvious explanation of why the man called Jihad should have carried out his attack at a synagogue on Yom Kippur: It was the day of the year on which the congregation was likely to be at its largest, and therefore when it would be easier to kill many congregants.

Looseness of language about murder is now so common that it is normal in Britain these days. Murders are frequently described, both by newspapers and judges, as cowardly, as if bravery in the commission of murder were an extenuation of it, or as if murderers had a moral duty to give their victims the chance to escape or fight back. The crime is murder, not cowardice, and a brave murderer—let us say one who stalks his victim in hazardous circumstances—is not better than a cowardly one.

Nor is the nature or character of the victim relevant in most cases, that is to say in cases where there is no mitigation or excuse. The victims of murder are often not of the best character themselves, but that is irrelevant to the seriousness of the crime. In Britain these days, the murders that make the news in its various formulations are often accompanied by so-called “tributes” to the victim, who had a lovely smile, was a keen amateur footballer, etc. It is not surprising that people, when asked about a victim, should become sentimental about him (three-quarters of victims of murder are male, but I have heard no calls for murderers to cease their discrimination in favor of males by increasing their productivity, so to speak, with females). To say that a victim was a doting father is not to say that he was good in all respects, for being a doting father is perfectly compatible with being a monster in many others. The more we discourse on the nature of the victim, the more we lose sight of the fundamental insight that murder is wrong because it is murder, not because the wrong person was killed.

This seems obvious, but such has been the effect of the study of psychology, sociology, and criminology that it is no longer obvious to all judges. I recall a British judge who sentenced a man who had killed a stranger in a supermarket by a single punch. The man fell to the ground, hit his head on the ground (he was in fragile health), and died of his injury.

The perpetrator was a career criminal who had not long ago emerged from prison, to which he had been sent for a crime of violence (also not his first). His girlfriend, herself a drug-addicted criminal, called him on her telephone because she had had an altercation with a man over a place in a queue at the checkout. Arriving in the supermarket, the killer saw a man standing near his wife and assumed that he was the man of whom she had complained. He hit him as an act of gallantry, as proof of how much he loved her.

While the man whom he hit lay prostrate and dying on the ground, his girlfriend informed him that he was not in fact the man with whom she had had her dispute. Still determined to play Sir Galahad, he asked her to point out that man to her, and he would have attacked him too had the brave (not cowardly) supermarket staff not prevented him.

In sentencing him, the judge said that “it would have been bad enough” if he “had got the right man,” but his victim was in fact innocent of the imputed offense against his girlfriend. It was most unfortunate that the man he “got” was innocent.

In other words, there was a right man for him to have “got”; and if he had “got” him, his crime would have been the less heinous and therefore have attracted a lesser sentence. Thus goes civilization in modern Britain—bearing in mind that the judge was almost certainly of the highest 1 percent of the population as far as length of education and training are concerned.

The man, despite his very violent past, despite the fact that he had no valid excuse or even mitigation for his action (for a trivial dispute over a place in a queue in a supermarket is not a reason to throw a powerful punch), received a sentence of only four years’ imprisonment, which in reality meant that he would “serve” only two—“serve” seems to me an odd locution in this context. It is perfectly obvious that he should have gone to prison for the rest of his natural life, irrespective of what misery that would have entailed for him: For what is such misery to set against the life of a man, and what kind of society has not the guts, the moral strength, to say to such a man, “If that is the kind of thing you do, your life as a free man is at an end”?

There is one small consolation. If I asked my plumber, my roofer, my decorator, my postman, my car mechanic (all men of practical intelligence), whether he thought the sentence of this man was appropriate or adequate, they would reply, “No,” for they are uncorrupted by modern education, whose main concern so often seems to be to alienate Man from common sense.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).