[WS:] Exactly, what does murdering schoolgirls for wanting to have education have to do with USAF bombing villages? You seem to be following the red herring set up by Shane to divert attention from the actual issue at hand.
As I said before, to me the "actual issue" is whether to support different types of insurgencies - communist or islamist - in the faced of the fact that both may commit murders. I suggested that communists deserve some credit because of their cause, while islamists do not for the same reason. So in a way, this was the question whether the end justifies the means.
However, I later realized that there is a second layer in this issue - one eloquently elaborated by Graeber when he discussed a close connection between honor and power and humiliation in warrior societies. Graeber's argument, in a nutshell, is that such societies power and honor is manifested by the degree to which persons - or rather men- wielding it can humiliate others, typically women. To support this, he quotes extensively from medieval English sources. Graeber may have put a rather weak case against finance capital, as some on this list have pointed out, but there is a lot of other good stuff in his book - and his analysis of the connection between honor and humiliation is a gem.
It is rather obvious that this argument can explain quite a bit about the draw of Taliban, wahabism, salafism, and religious fundamentalism in general. It provides a moral justification of a sort to the male desire to establish or defend "honor" by humiliating others, especially women. By this logic of honor/power, without the ability to humiliate, these males would be reduced to the lowlife vermin status which they accord to their victims. Religious justification of this ability to humiliate is important, because it redefines these males from being common gangsters who rely on raw power and violence to uphold their status, to noble defenders of tradition and a way of life.
I think that is the main reason why these men murder women who want to get education. They correctly sense that getting education would remove these women from their power to humiliate them, so they kill or maim them to maintain their honor.
This is why I have such a visceral reaction toward these ""warrior" men. I believe that their desire to protect their honor undermines the most fundamental social relations - empathy, reciprocity, mutual trust and solidarity.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."