Lassana Bethily, a Muslim man from Mali, saved the lives of at least six people during Friday's attack on Hyper Cacher, a kosher supermarket in Paris. During the mayhem, the 24-year-old store clerk ushered the terrified patrons to safety by hiding them in the supermarket's basement freezer. Upstairs, jihadist Amedy Coulibaly, who claimed to be affiliated with ISIS, was armed with AK-47s and explosives. He held 15 hostages and, by the time the hours-long ordeal was over, had killed four.

In an interview with French TV station BFMTV, Bethily described the nightmarish scenario: "I went down to the freezer, I opened the door, there were several people who went in with me. I turned off the light and the freezer." Upstairs, Coulibaly was threatening to kill hostages if police raided the printing plant where the Charlie Hebdo killers (and suspected co-conspirators) Cherif and Said Kouachi were holed up. "I brought them inside and I told them to stay calm here, I'm going to go out," said Bethily. "When they got out, they thanked me." The police weren't so kind at first; Bethily describes being handcuffed for an hour and a half because cops assumed he was one of the terrorists.

By the time it was all over, Coulibably and the Koachi brothers were dead, shot by security forces in simultaneous raids on the supermarket and the printing plant. The following day, the French newspaper L'Express ran the headline "Lassana Bathily, "Malian Muslim' hero of the hostage situation in Vincennes" as many on social media lauded the young man as a hero.

Of course, treating Muslims like human beings isn't for everyone, as bigoted fossil Rupert Murdoch proved when tweeted this: "Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible." Murdoch evidently thinks the actions of three violent maniacs should be attributed to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims – a number that includes Bathily.

On Saturday, Bathily gave an interview to BFMTV in which he made a simple plea for coexistence: "We are brothers. It's not a question of Jews, of Christians or of Muslims. We're all in the same boat, we have to help each other to get out of this crisis." At a time when religiously motivated violence shows no sign of abating, it's a far more enlightened sentiment than Murdoch appears capable of.