Quotable

"Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam. Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery."

- M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. From here.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White captures a caravan of Muslim Indians fleeing from east to west Punjab escaping Sikh mobs, slowly streaming past the dead of a previous caravan & the whitened bones of their buffaloes & bullocks, India, April 20, 1945. From Life archives here.

On turnouts and community organizing

On the turnout yesterday:

Via Kos: Provided the number stands, the turnout rate for yesterday's election was the highest in 100 years, according to the estimate from turnout guru Dr. Michael
McDonald at George Mason University. Almost 137 million (136,631,825) went to the polls... There is a chance that American turnout will match or surpass the 1960 turnout, and if it does, that will mean approximately 136 million people voted. That raw number will be the most people who have ever voted in an American election.

Also a quick recap of community organizing (the kind of organizing that Gov. Palin said was a job that shouldered no real responsibilities)...

Community organizing is a process by which people living in proximity to each other are brought together by an organization to act in their common self-interest. Community organizers may act as area-wide coordinators of programs for different agencies in an attempt to meet community needs for various services. Community organizers may work actively, as do other types of social workers, in community councils of social agencies and in community-action groups. At times the role of community organizers overlaps that of the social
planner.

Barack Obama started as a community organizer. Maybe it was the ethos of community organizing that people saw as a reason to go to the hustings in such large numbers... I do not know and maybe we will never know.
All said and done, it was a victory for America and our people in the large scheme of things - the country, the concept, this glorious experiment in progress.