The militants responsible for blowing up the pet market in Baghdad have finally made a statement about how far removed they are from the rest of normal human society. The weapon: bomb vests strapped on mentally disabled women (though I don't know how the militants mentally disabled the women... probably through endless repetition of boring militant rhetoric). The detonator: a cell phone. The target: pets -- kitties, doggies, monkeys (actually, these shouldn't be kept as pets), birds, and the kids who throng the market every week looking for an animal they can shower their budding affection on. And the regular joes, shmoes, and janes taking their families out on a weekend jaunt, the usual IED fodder.

Don't know what's up with them militants. It's fine if they blow themselves up 'cos there'll be less of them in the world, but they aren't even doing that now. They're detonating bombs by remote control showing that cynical as they are about life, they do feel that there is at least one life worth saving: their own.

If we look through their eyes, this is what we'll probably see: Women have attractive qualities so they make good bait to draw as many as possible into the kill zone. The mentally disabled are of no use to anyone and are probably carrying the curse of the Almighty anyway, so no loss there, and no backchat either. The cell phone to them is not a device for getting to know people but to communicate their miscreant tendencies instead. The poor shlubs who got blown up , well, the more the merrier, and the stronger the statement that nobody matters in this petty vendetta of theirs. And the animals? People seem to care more for the four-legged beasties that serve neither as labour nor food than for the militants themselves and their pitiful cause, so they deserve to get blown up too.

That's it, then. There's no one left that they would want to share this world with. So why don't we just offer them a nice asteroid for them to inhabit and leave the rest of us alone? A couple of hundred smelly bearded guys squatting on an arid rock floating through the cosmos. After all, if and when they achieve their desired objective, that's still going to be the net result.