I almost witnessed a man being beheaded. Not in the flesh, fortunately, but on a mobile phone screen. This was no Hollywood production with fake blood and gory special effects; this was amateur footage of a man in Syria having his head cut off with a hand knife.

I had struck up conversation with a Ghanaian taxi driver on the way to JFK airport in New York and we got on to the subject of terrorism and fanatical Islam. ‘A friend of mine just sent me this,’ he revealed cheerfully, handing me his mobile phone. The footage showed a man in his thirties lying on his side, his head pinned to the ground and hair grabbed at the crown of his head, with a dagger held to his throat. As the camera zoomed out it revealed a man clad in black restraining the unfortunate victim; he wore a balaclava with holes for the eyes. An unseen aid spouted religious nonsense in the background. At one point, the man tried to look up at the camera and his captor pushed his head back to the ground, firmly yet surprisingly gently. The man did not struggle and did not appear to panic and yet he must have known what was in store for him. I tried to imagine what must be going through his mind.

As the chanting reached a crescendo, I turned the screen away before the knife penetrated the man’s throat. ‘That’s too much!’ I said, handing the phone back to the driver. As he retrieved the phone, I couldn’t help catching a glimpse of the man’s half severed head in a pool of blood. It was such a short glimpse that it was a still shot rather than a movie clip but it was enough to make me sick to the stomach. The driver continued to describe how they held up his severed head but I had already seen more than enough.

The clip reminded me of news footage from Iraq in 2004 which showed Kim Sun-il, a 33-year-old South Korean translator, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and blindfolded, flanked by masked men bearing weapons. ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ he screamed, as I’m sure I would. On mainstream news channels the footage was cut before he was beheaded by one his captors. With the rise of extremist militant groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabab, such brutal acts are likely to continue. From the decapitation of a British soldier on the streets of London to the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, where one of my former colleagues was murdered and several friends were affected by the violence, there are few boundaries to the brutality.

Of course, brutality it not limited to Islamic terrorists. Western powers are accomplished in this area too. John Pilger’s film The War You Don’t See http://vimeo.com/67739294 opens with previously unreported footage of a US Apache gunship attack on a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007. It starts with a black-and-white view of a street in Baghdad. ‘See all those people standing down there, er ’bout there one o’clock,’ a male American voice can be heard. ‘Once you get on ’em just open ’em up. Light ’em all up.’ The camera crosshairs centre on a group of men on a street corner. ‘Come on fire!’ A burst of machinegun fire can be heard and the men fall to the ground in a cloud of dust. The voice continues: ‘Keep shoot’n, keep shoot’n. Keep shoot’n.’ The gunfire resumes. Two young children are among the 19 people killed.

Such an act is generally not seen as barbaric as beheading a man. Indeed, one could be watching a video game, and perhaps those behind the gun find it hard to distinguish between real life and playing war games. And yet, essentially, there is no difference between beheading an innocent person and shooting one in the street. A life is a life. But to quote George Orwell: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. It is the act of viewing ‘others’ as different, less worthy, less human, that is at the route of such extremes of violence. During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, Hutu extremists referred to their Tutsi neighbours as inyenzi, a Kinyarwanda word meaning ‘cockroach’. Dehumanizing others allows the perpetrators to justify their actions. Whether they use religious or cultural ideology as justification, I believe that violence against civilians is driven by the desire for power and a cowardly disregard for others seen as different or ‘less equal’.

I never thought I would say this, but I have come to the conclusion that women should rule the world. Not women, such as Margaret Thatcher and Condoleeza Rice, that try to compete with men by becoming more masculine than them, but real women: mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters. Women are more likely to discuss than to fight, more likely to seek solutions than retaliation, more likely to strive for peace than power, and more likely to love than to hate. The Northern Ireland peace agreement came to be because of a woman, Mo Mowlam (much as Tony Blair likes to claim otherwise). It was Mo, the first female Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who decided to go into the high security Maze prison in Belfast to meet and talk with convicted murderers face-to-face and unaccompanied. She had been preceded by a procession of men, all whom had refused to ‘negotiate with terrorists’.

The unnamed Syrian man was brought into this world by a woman, who, from the first flickers of life in her womb, nurtured and loved him. She went through the pain of giving birth, suckled him at the breast, woke with him in the night, changed him when he was dirty, taught him to eat, helped him to crawl, rejoiced with his first step, revelled in his first words, fretted over his first day at school and celebrated his last. So much care and attention goes into raising a child. What gives another man the right to take such a life? Perhaps only a mother can fully understand what an abomination that is.