CAN WE CONNECT THE DOTS? BY HJS!

During the past few weeks, we have been bombarded with an old, venerated intelligence term, “connecting the dots”. You may remember that it was once the name of a child's game that we used to find on cereal boxes and in the kiddies' section of the Sunday paper. I guess the first dots we ever connected in our minds were the ones for the Big Dipper and Little Dipper in the night sky.

Today part of our country is engaged in a great war of dots. The radical Islamists and their friends have warned us time and time again that evil things are coming to us. Over the years, we discovered to our dismay that each warning was a dot, and each dot was a terrible calamity that was planned to hurt us badly.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a dot. The first attempt at destroying the World Trade Center was a dot. The Christmas attempt at blowing up a commercial airplane was a dot. The conspiracy to suicide-bomb an embassy is a dot. The planners and recruiters are dots, and so are those who are recruited. As you can guess, there are many dots and they are scattered around the world—and some of them move.

Islamists have played this terrible game since the year 627, the Battle of the Trench—you can find the battle in the Quran, sura 33, verses 9 – 20. One of Muhammad's dots was an Iranian by the name of Salman Farsi. A visitor to Medina, he suggested to his host that he might dig a few trenches around Medina to protect Medina from the might of the Meccan army. The trenches actually frustrated the Meccans; they could not get at the Muslims. Another dot was a few people sent by Muhammad to spread misinformation to the Meccans, the Banu Qaraiza, and others, aiming to spread distrust among them. That dot indeed was successful in driving wedges among the confederates who were against Muhammad, weakening the attacks. Those two dots made the difference between Muhammad's defeat and death, and total victory of Islam over Mecca, and ultimately over Saudi Arabia and then about half the world and pretty close to the rest of the world. [You can also read about the Battle of the Trench at the following site:
http://www.thewaytotruth.org/prophetmuhammad/trench.html ].

Whenever you are tempted to waive aside one broken-up attempt at blowing up an airplane or an arrested sleeper cell or forget about a discovered conspiracy to suicide-bomb an embassy, just remember that these are only just a few dots out of thousands of dots waiting to be implemented. Even if our success rate is 99.9 percent, it is still not good enough. The next point-one percent may be all that is needed to finish us, or weaken us to the point in which they can finish us. What would follow would be worse than your worst nightmare. If you are leaving it up to God to end the evil, think again. He does not always take a hand if it is something we can do ourselves with a little work and lots of dedication. It has been shown more than once that evil can win over good, especially when the evil is dedicated and the good people are comfortable and have no passion for defending themselves or actively fighting evil on its own terms.