VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict prayed on Sunday for the victims of what he called "senseless" violence in Mumbai and Nigeria, where hundreds of people have been killed.

"The causes and circumstances of these tragic events are different, but the horror and the condemnation for the explosion of such a cruel and senseless violence must be one," the pope said after his weekly Angelus blessing in St Peter's Square.

Militants killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai last week, while clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs in the central Nigerian city of Jos left around 400 people dead.

The pope said he was asking God to "touch the heart of those who delude themselves this is the way to resolve local or international problems."

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In Nigeria, the Muslim Hausa have been moving southward into Christian areas and everywhere attempting to dominate, as they believe they have a right to do so.  And they have imposed Shari'a in a dozen of Nigeria's states. Local Christians, but black African not Western Christians, and not quite as willing to go quietly, rebelled against this state of affairs and fought back, in some cases with as much deadly force as Muslims so often do, and in the West are merely rounded up, one by one, and prosecuted as a matter of criminal justice.

In India, Muslims -- whether from India proper, or from that part of Kashmir held by India r that held by Pakistan, or from Pakistan -- wanted to inflict as much damage on India and on Infidels, especially on American and British nationals, and Jews whatever their nationality -- through mass-murder.

Neither in the city of Jos, in Nigeria, nor in Mumbai,  in India, was what happened "senseless." It all makes sense, and can be adequately explained by reference to the doctrine, and the practice, of Islam. The word "senseless" encourages abdication of mental responsibility: the responsibility to study enough, to think enough, so as to make understandable to oneself and to others what  has happened, and even to be capable of predicting what will happen.  Everyone should stop making "senseless" remarks. But  nobody's perfect. And nobody's infallible -- that's merely, and only in some quarters,  a late nineteenth-century notion.