Together with news of the beheading of a South Korean civilian, Kim Sun-il, newspapers carried a photo of his anguished parents. The father's head is bent over as he weeps, while the mother's eyes are screwed tight in agony.

This portrait of pain and bereavement must be similar to the suffering of the families of other innocent victims of this and other conflicts around the world. Parents of soldiers and partisans can derive some consolation from the fact that their loved ones died in the line of duty or for a cause. They are further comforted by institutional support groups.

But the mental torture suffered by those far from the kidnapping must be sheer agony for the family: they have no power to meet the hostage-takers' demands, and are reduced to pleading with their governments to do whatever it takes to return their loved ones to them. On the internet and television screens, we can now see the desperate pleas of those condemned to die.

And now, thanks to the callousness and the inhumanity of those responsible for these atrocities, we can even see the executions on videos that are sent to TV stations and posted on the internet. From Daniel Pearl to Paul Johnson, the world has been sickened at the sight of their decapitation. How their murderers can expect any support after their terrible actions is beyond me. Surely such bloody crimes must forever tarnish whatever cause these killers claim to fight for.

But no nation or society has a monopoly on pain: the shock and sense of pointless loss recently visited on the parents and other relatives of Kim Sun-li must be similar to the feelings of the parents of innocent victims in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan, Kashmir and all those areas where terrorism stalks the land, claiming innocent lives at random.

And who are these holy warriors who besmirch their faith by these awful deeds? They come from different backgrounds and have joined different terrorist organizations, but do have some elements in common. According to Jessica Stern, lecturer at Harvard University and author of "Terror In The Name Of God: Why Religious Militants Kill", writing in a recent issue of the Financial Times magazine:

"...Rage turns to conviction. They seem to enter a kind of trance, where the world is divided neatly between good and evil, victim and oppressor. Uncertainty and ambivalence, always painful to experience, are banished. There is no room for the other side's point of view. Because they believe their cause is just and that God is on their side, they persuade themselves that any action - no matter how heinous - is justified. They know they are right, not just politically, but morally."

It is this self-righteousness that has caused hugely destructive religious wars since the dawn of history. Each side says, in effect: "My god is bigger and stronger than yours, and he is firmly on my side. Your religion is inferior to mine, and therefore you are inferior to me." This mindset makes people to see exclusively in black and white, good and evil, apart from making the adversary somehow less than human.

Another factor fuelling this desire to lash out is the feeling of failure; of being unable to compete. As Dr Stern observes in her article: "The greatest rage - and the greatest danger - stems from those who feel they can't keep up, even as they claim to be superior to those who set the pace..."

Perhaps the forces unleashed by globalization have done more to polarize the world than any other single factor. In the introduction to his prescient book "Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalizm And Tribalizm Are Reshaping The World", Benjamin Barber discusses the dialectic between globalization (McWorld) and the forces of tribalism and sectarianism (Jihad). The author maintains:

"...In the short run the forces of Jihad, noisier and more obviously nihilistic than those of McWorld, are likely to dominate the near future, etching small stories of local tragedy and regional genocide on the face of our times and creating a climate of instability marked by multimicrowars."

"But in the long run, the forces of McWorld are the forces underlying the slow certain thrust of western civilization and as such may be unstoppable. Jihad's microwars will hold the headlines well into the next century... But McWorld's homogenization is likely to establish a macropeace that favours the triumph of commerce and its markets and give those who control information, communication and entertainment ultimate (if inadvertent) control over human destiny..."

Barber published his book in 1995, long before 9/11 and its subsequent horrors.

But while Barber looks ahead with the calm detachment of the scholar, parents like those of Kim Sun-li have to deal with their pain and their loss now. Talk of 'microwars' leading ultimately to 'macropeace' is scarcely going to comfort them. In most cases, the victims had nothing to do with the conflict: they were just doing routine, humdrum jobs that took them to the wrong place at the wrong time.

All civilized people have been horrified at the treatment of prisoners at the hands of their American gaolers at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, among other detention centres. Although the revulsion in the Muslim world has been the greatest, ordinary people and the media in the West have been vociferous in their criticism. However, we in the Muslim world have not been as outraged over the beheading of western hostages: our expressions of horror have a 'but' hanging at the end.

It is natural that we mourn the passing of our own more deeply than we do the death of strangers. But there is a common vocabulary for grief that unites people across the world, especially when the innocent meet violent and unnecessary ends. When terrorists target women and children, or civilian men totally unconnected to whatever cause they espouse, they attack the common values we share, irrespective of our religion or colour or nationality.

All too often, we tend to justify the actions of a particular group as it goes about its bloody business on the grounds that 'its cause is just'. No cause can possibly justify the slaughter of the innocent, whether it is done by an army or a terrorist organization. Each time we use this argument to dignify a murder, we strengthen the killers and diminish our humanity.