This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff, Assistant Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Africa Institute.

Mumbai was not the only bleeding city last week. In Jos, Nigeria, located in the heart of what is called the “middle belt”, violence between Christian and Muslim mobs protesting what they said were rigged local elections resulted in 400 people dead and 7,000 more displaced.

The loss of innocent lives in Jos is tragic, and I sincerely hope that the Nigerian authorities will investigate and prosecute the perpetrators.

But we must avoid the impulse to simplify by classifying both the Jos and Mumbai massacres as “religious violence.” Neither the Jos nor the Mumbai massacres were caused by religion, and the use of a common label to describe both events elides critical empirical and moral distinctions.

The main distinction is that the Jos killings, though tragic, served concrete political objectives and can be explained through self-interest. But the Mumbai massacres-just like the 9/11 attacks-do not advance any conceivable political objective. The Mumbai massacres were irrational, barbaric, and nihilistic. And as the great political theorist Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, such forms of terror are the hallmark of totalitarian movements.

We will have to wait for investigators to reveal more facts about the causes of violence in Jos before we draw final conclusions. But it appears that this spasm-just like the outbreak of so-called “ethnic” clashes in Kenya last year-was a direct result of political competition in the wake of a disputed election. According to Human Rights Watch, the violence began on November 28, 2008, following a disputed local election in which supporters of the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party, which has its base in the mostly Muslim north, accused the ruling People’s Democratic Party of rigging the election results. Over the next three days, clashes erupted between rival Muslim and Christian mobs. Since the transition to democracy in 1999, electoral cycles have often sparked geographically limited-though deadly-bouts of violence between ethnic or religious groups.

But violence organized to serve a specific, identifiable political goal is fundamentally different from the recent barbarism in Mumbai. Indian officials believe that a militant Islamist group based in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was behind the Mumbai massacre, though the group has denied responsibility. The one gunman captured alive was from Pakistan and has admitted to being a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

As this useful backgrounder from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) notes, Lashkar e-Taiba was formed in 1993 to fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir. But even if its original goal qualifies as a rational political objective, the group’s more recent statements and targets suggest that its ideology has become more radical over the past few years.

The CFR report notes that Lashkar e-Taiba’s agenda goes far beyond challenging Indian sovereignty of Kashmir. According to a pamphlet entitled “Why Are We Waging Jihad,” its goal is to restore Islamic rule all over India and “seeks to bring about a union of all Muslim majority regions in countries that surround Pakistan.” The group has declared the United States, India, and Israel to be existential enemies of Islam. The targets of the 2008 Mumbai attacks-hotels associated with the Indian elite, western tourists, and a Jewish community center-fit into this ideology.

Restore Islamic rule all over India and unify Muslim regions around Pakistan? Israel, India, and the US as existential enemies of Islam? This is not Islam. It is toxic Al Qaeda ideology, straight up. Whether or not Al Qaeda was directly involved is irrelevant, because Lashkar e-Taiba has absorbed Al Qaeda’s ideology. And the crimes which this ideology fuels are a completely different phenomenon from the tragic violence in Jos last week.