Whether you grew up watching reality law enforcement programs or fictional mafia movies, there’s one thing everyone knows: When a known hit man murders a stranger, the odds are at least ten to one that he was paid to do it. Find the person who paid him, and you’ve identified the real responsible party.

This doesn’t just go for individual crimes, either.  The same principle applies on the grand scale.

On Oct. 7, 2023, a horde of Islamofascist terrorists known as Hamas launched simultaneous, carefully coordinated attacks on Israel.

Hundreds of rockets were fired into civilian communities in Israel.  Crowds of terrorists charged across the border and attacked private residences, shooting up apartments and houses, raping and beating innocent individuals and families. Squads sought out the partygoers at a music festival, slaughtering the unarmed with abandon. Hamas killed or injured thousands that day - mostly unarmed, unsuspecting civilians.

Israel is responding, as Israel must.  But on the world stage, Israel doesn’t have the ability to go much further back, to deal with the sources, as we can in regular domestic law enforcement. 

Israel can attack the nearby perpetrators, the bloodthirsty demons of Hamas who gave the orders and managed the attacks.  But Israel is limited in what it can do beyond the Holy Land. 

They can study, publicize their findings, try to shame the guilty on the world stage, but their reach is limited.

In much the same way as that hit man we identified can be caught by local police, but we need the FBI to capture the mafiosi who hired him, Israel can root out the Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, but Israel is limited in its ability to go after the global villains who fund and direct Hamas.

Someone is buying Hamas all these missiles.  Someone provides them with training and gear, intelligence and equipment, rifles and grenades.  And these people who ship them money and weaponry, fully intending that the recipients will use them against innocent Israeli civilians, are just as guilty as the homicidal maniacs pulling the trigger.

Who?

It’s not even a secret.

The group that has been chanting “Death to Israel” for decades, the group that has taught their children and their allies to shout “From the river to the sea,” confirming in no uncertain terms that their genocidal goal is to wipe the nation of Israel off the face of the earth, is a client state of Iran.

Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and ever since local elections were held in 2006, the people of the Gaza Strip have chosen the terrorists of Hamas to rule them.

The Gaza Strip is located on a stretch of seashore on the Mediterranean. Has its government sought international investors to build a modern economy to support its people?  Have they taken advantage of their 24 miles of potentially beautiful coastline to build resorts, or have they attempted to build manufacturing centers to provide careers and prosperity for their two million residents?

Time and time again, when Israel and others have tried to support the building of plants, factories, and logistics centers in the Gaza Strip, Hamas terrorism has necessitated Israel closing the borders and revoking import/export privileges.  It’s impossible to have a manufacturing sector without public utilities, but Hamas sabotage has destroyed such facilities. It’s impossible to manufacture goods without raw materials, but Israel has had to close down maritime traffic to Gaza because Gaza’s suppliers keep filling “humanitarian aid” shipments full of armaments. 

Whether from Egypt, Turkey, Iran or Lebanon, Israelis have learned the hard way that allowing goods into the Gaza Strip means endangering the innocent civilians of Israel.  So Israel has had to crack down, again and again.

The events of October 7 prove the case. Hamas is not allowed to maintain a military; they get billions of dollars in aid from their foreign allies, money that could and should be targeted to improving the lot of their people, the so-called “palestinians,” of whom nearly half are children and teenagers.  But despite this very real need for humanitarian support and economic development, Hamas puts its energy, its funding, and its rhetoric into its single-minded war cry: “Death to Israel.”

And where exactly does Gaza’s funding come from?

The governments of Iran and Qatar are major donors, plus a global network of expats who either identify with the Gazans (a mixture of arab ethnicities, but primarily Egyptian) or with Hamas’ very public goal of destroying Israel and emptying it of Jews.

The history books tell us that Hamas was originally an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian terrorist organization. Today, however, Hamas is usually considered more directly a client of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, itself the Lebanese branch of the Iranian council of mullahs - an oligarchy that has ruled Iran with a bloody iron fist for almost 45 years now.

So it is that when Hamas moves a muscle, one can safely assume that Iran is the one pulling the strings.

The issue of Hamas’ funding sources has attracted a bit more attention than usual, in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.  Israel has announced that it’s blocking whatever sources it can find with proof of the money going to weaponry. They have blocked bank accounts at Barclays and huge cryptocurrency accounts that have long been a way for investors to move money in violation of sanctions, crypto being more easily hidden from view than real currency or investments.

But these are the obvious sources – terrorist supporting rogue states and fellow islamofascist extremists. The really big money in Gaza comes from sources that many would assume are peacemakers.

The United Nations, in fact, is arguably the biggest single funding source for Hamas, having directed well over five billion dollars in spending to the Gaza Strip in the past decade.  Such money isn’t provided without strings, of course, but money is fungible. If one source covers food and water, that frees up the money from other charities to be spent on rockets and rifles.

Perhaps most shocking to Americans is the amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars that are sent to Hamas. Outside of an attempt by the Trump administration to block U.S. taxes from going to Hamas from 2017 through 2020, the Obama and Biden regimes have diverted tens of millions, again and again, whenever they could find an excuse.  Never for arms, directly, of course; but money is fungible.

One of the first visual images confronted by an economics student is the idea of “expending resources on guns or butter.” The larger a percentage of your income you have to spend on butter, the less you can afford to spend on guns, and vice versa.

As long as the United States, the United Nations, and other allegedly peaceful countries provide funds to Gaza, and as long as Hamas continues to direct Gaza’s treasury, it’s as if we peaceful westerners ourselves were the ones buying Hamas the weapons.

People who’ve been paying attention will recall the midnight flights of billions of dollars in currency that the Obama regime illegally sent to Tehran, a vision refreshed by the Biden regime’s gift of releasing billions in foreign funds to Tehran a few short weeks ago.

When Iran has money, their client terror states have rockets.

The courageous and talented Israeli Defense Forces can work on ridding Gaza of its homicidal anti-semitic population, but what can we do, here, a world away?

Well, at the very least, we can stand up on election day, and fire the American politicians who keep paying these hit men with our money. The Democratic Party has been funding these vermin for far too long.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II).

Image: Kamran.nef, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0