War is a filthy word. Forget the pomp and circumstance of military bands. Forget the stark majesty of Armistice Day. War is fought in the dirt.

We see bodies on our screens every night. They lie around the pavements of Kabul or Baghdad. They stick out of the mounds of rubble in what is left of Aleppo. On Friday night they were on the streets of Paris and the terror felt close enough to smell.

But among the carnage and distress, there were rare flashes of crystal clarity that lit up the darkness and showed what really matters to us as human beings.

One such was the emotional testimony posted on Facebook by 22-year-old Isobel Bowdery, originally from North London who survived the Bataclan slaughter. For an hour this young woman played dead amongst the corpses.

She wrote: "I feel privileged to be there for their last breaths. And....promise their last thoughts were not on the animals who caused this. It was thinking of the people they loved.

"As I lay in the blood of strangers waiting for my bullet, I envisioned every face that I have ever loved and whispered I love you, over and over again. …Wishing that they knew that, no matter what happened to me, to keep believing in the good in people. To not let those men win."

As I read her words I heard an echo from the people in the Twin Towers. Knowing death was imminent, many of them telephoned home to leave post-mortem messages of love.

It was the same for passengers on the hijacked aircraft. Their last moments of life were not spent demanding vengeance. Neither was it to speak of possessions or wills or legacies. It was simply to tell their families how much they loved them.

Diane Foley, mother of the beheaded journalist James, also put triumphalism in its place when news broke of the US drone strike last week that killed Jihadi John.

Journalists who rushed to hear her response were surprised when she said her son would be "devastated" by the revenge killing. "Jim was a peace maker" who would have wanted to help that "deranged young man," she said.

She painted in words the chasm between the murderous assassin and the man he beheaded on camera. Jihadi John was diminished to the status of deranged youth rather than image-savvy terrorist.

Which do we now see as the stronger? The masked delinquent or the magnanimous victim? Which will history judge to be the winner?

Such fine-ness of spirit from those caught innocently in bloody terrorism has an important message for all the rest of us. It sets a shining example that we would be wise to consider and then to follow. It’s about the importance of continuing to show faith in all that is good in human nature – for those of us who have been fortunate enough not to have had our lives thrown into chaos by terrorism to be rock solid on that point.

We saw a similarly fine and wise response in Norway after Anders Breivik went on the rampage killing 77, many of them teenagers. Breivik was a right-wing Islamophobe, a dangerous and deranged oddball who subscribed to any number of fascist ideas. Following the massacre, Norway renewed its commitment to migration, integration and social democracy.

Wasn’t that something?

We now know that one of the Paris terrorists was an immigrant who had come through the Greek island of Lesbos, so what should our response be?

The question is particularly pertinent in Glasgow where the first flight carrying Syrian refugees is expected today. Some of the people on board will have lost their homes or family members to bombing or survived atrocities as great as or worse than those in Paris. They too will have fled the extremism of Islamic State (IS). They are coming here because they have nowhere else to turn.

So do we look at them with guarded suspicion, lest one amongst them is a terrorist under cover? Or is it incumbent on us to greet them with warmth and to think the best of them, as we would any other visitor?

In this instance we have the reassurance that they have been vetted at least twice since they were selected from the refugee camp where they have been living. So surely no-one would be so blinkered or prejudiced to make them feel unwelcome? I hope not.

But what should be our wider response to Paris and to the threat that something similar could happen here, in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or in London? We won’t hear many politicians – other than Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – speak a language of peace and reconciliation.

War was President Hollande’s word. In the wake of the Paris attack, French military jets launched their biggest raid in Syria, dropping 20 bombs on the IS stronghold of Raqqa.

In Britain, David Cameron is being asked about Britain extending its aerial offensive against IS in Iraq across the border into Syria. I hope he holds back at least until the anti-IS forces have agreed some workable strategy for ending the Syrian war. For what is the point of yet more bombing without a political strategy? We need thought through solutions now, not more posturing by politicians trying to sound tough.

IS is an enemy whose greatest weapon is ideology as well as its ability to recruit lost young men to its barbarous mission by giving them a cause, a sense of importance.

But do we plan to kill all of them with bombs? Bombs don’t atomise beliefs.

In a trenchant article, that veteran of conflict Paddy Ashdown set out his arguments against "our obsession with high explosives as our only instrument of foreign policy".

He argued military force is most effectively used when it underpins diplomatic strategy. His hopes for an end to the Syrian conflict lie in Vienna where the American secretary of State John Kerry is in talks with Iran, Saudi Arabia and other interested parties.

Meanwhile a parallel war has been declared. A masked spokesman for Anonymous, the hacker activist group, declared it would hunt the terrorists down saying in twitter language #Anonymous is at war with #Daesh.

Is this the future?

Cyber war can detect and disrupt or destroy money flow, arms deliveries, recruitment and assassination videos; everything that happens online. It can strike with the precision and detachment of a remotely-controlled drone. Crucially it can demolish organisational structures with no bloodshed.

This surely is one strand of a more intelligent response to the IS threat because its adherents can live amongst us only revealing their intent when they move to kill us and themselves.

Like you I’m sure, I would give anything to see IS beaten, the threat removed from all our lives. But we must find a way that does not destroy countries, render nations homeless and kill the innocent (which we do too often with our so-called surgical strikes from the air). We must find a way that preserves our own standards of humanity.

Like Isobel Bowdery, "we must keep believing in the good in people. To not let those men win".