Malala Yousafzai - the fifteen year old girl shot by the Pakistani Taliban for championing education for girls - is many things: she is a brave, she is a person of principle and she is an inspiration to anyone who supports of the idea of human rights.
Her father - Ziauddin Yousafzai said "When she fell, Pakistan stood and the world rose," Engaging words - and a fair reflection of what happened as the news of the shooting spread around the world.
As is now well known - Malala was shot by a member of the Taliban at close range and in front of other school children - shot by a man prepared to execute a schoolgirl to prevent other girls and women getting an education. The Taliban, it appears, are a group of men intent on imposing their perverted views on others by fear and violence and cold blooded murder.
A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, has been quoted as claiming responsibility on behalf of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani offshoot of the Taliban.
"She was pro-west, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her ideal leader," Ehsan told Reuters. "She was young but she was promoting western culture in Pashtun areas," he said, referring to the main ethnic group in north-western Pakistan and Afghanistan from which the Taliban finds most of its followers.
The Taliban had previously announced the girl was on their "hit list" because of her backing for "the imposition of secular government" in Swat.
So that's alright then - they tried to execute because she wanted some democracy in her own country: not because of her views on education - well why didn't they say so sooner?
Contrast and compare the two people involved - Malala who bravely spoke out for the rights of half of her fellow citizens and wants democracy for her country - and the cold blooded gunman who wanted her dead so that people like him could enslave their fellow citizens.
Many of us in the UK take education (and democracy) for granted or have at best a grudging acceptance of it. Malala on the other hand is willing to risk her life for it. It should remind us of its real value - perhaps education and democracy are only really appreciated by someone for whom it might be denied.
Education sets people free - it gives them the confidence and the ideas to take a view on the world and the potential to prosper on equal terms and it is easy to imagine the Taliban would not want that.
The contrast is a stark one - the young women who has inspired the free world and her enemies the men who want anything but freedom.
People in Pakistan and around the world were energized and inspired because of the stark contrast between what Malala stands for her what those who would take her life stand for. It was that she stood for things that make people's lives better and used words where her enemies want to enslave people using murder.
Is there a bigger picture here? Have the Western drone attacks caused the Pakistan Taliban to shoot young Pakistani women? Have the US and UK troops in Afghanistan caused the Taliban to hate women?
The politics in around Pakistan and Afghanistan is complex I am sure. That western forces are in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and launching drone attacks in Pakistan - and sometimes (too often) innocent men, women and children are killed - makes it more complicated still.
One thing seems clear though - grown men trying to execute schoolgirls because they disagree about how their society should be run is a perversion of human nature. The world would be a better place if there were more people like Malala and fewer people like the cold blooded gunman who tried to take her life.