At this time of year, we look for charities to support. Before we pick them, we look into how those charities spend the money they receive. Which is the worthiest cause; which charities carefully spend their income on the purposes we want them to? As individuals, we can research those charities before we write a single check.

Does our government do the same?

Our government spends an enormous amount of our money on “causes” big and small all over the world.

Before they decide to spend billions of dollars in aid and provide favorable public relations to a foreign country or organization, does our establishment take anywhere near the same level of care in these choices that we do in our personal charitable giving?

For example, the above representatives have long given billions of their dollars -- and that means our dollars -- to Hamas, as the administrators of the Gaza Strip.

Since the world was shocked on October 7 by Hamas’ surprise attacks on Israel -- murdering over 1200 innocents, kidnapping over 200, injuring thousands more -- the world has begun to learn things about Hamas that it never suspected.

For many Westerners -- not just Americans -- Hamas has been thought of as two different things: a political activist group happy to use terror, and simultaneously the legitimate, elected government of the Gaza Strip, a section of Israel given home rule powers in 2006.

The world has known that Hamas never really stopped being terrorist in inclination and method. But the world still felt an obligation to “the people of the Gaza Strip” (they call themselves “Palestinians”), so the public accepted the fiction that Hamas wears these two hats, and they would just speak to Hamas, and view Hamas on matters of public policy, as if it were only wearing the hat of the legitimate government of the Gaza Strip.

“We have to send money and aid to Gaza, for the people. We have to send in food and medical equipment. We have to give them irrigation pipes and fertilizer for their nascent farming efforts. We have to give them plumbing and electrical systems so they can develop the infrastructure for a manufacturing community. Hamas is the legitimate government, so we’ll give it to them to distribute.”

The world has imagined that Hamas respected these two distinct hats, and would wear the terrorist hat when receiving guns and bombs from Iran and Lebanon, but would wear the government hat when receiving humanitarian aid from us, and of course Hamas would honor a clear line of demarcation between the two.

All has been revealed since October 7.

As “the innocent residents of Gaza” have pled for food since the war began, the world has been forced to ask, “what about all that agricultural equipment we’ve been sending all these years?” and we learn that they’ve grown precious little food with it.

As “the innocent residents of Gaza” have pled for water since the war began, the world has had to confront the question, “your whole territory is basically shoreline, wouldn’t water treatment plants have been among the first things built with the billions of dollars in aid we’ve sent you?” And the answer comes back that no, they just expected water and food to be supplied for free by others, forever, no matter how they behaved.

As “the innocent residents of Gaza” have pled for a restoration of all the incoming humanitarian aid they’ve grown accustomed to over the years, the world has been forced to realize the truth at last: that there has never been anything humanitarian about it. They’ve been using that aid for something else, all along.

In a revealing December 3 posting, Reuters has had to admit that Israel has discovered far more Hamas tunnels than the West had dared imagine. Over 800 shafts leading to hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. Reuters tellingly compared the network to the New York subway system, crammed into an area less than half the size of NYC.

The intention of such a comparison is to educate the reader on how difficult a job it is for Israel to destroy these illegal terror tunnels.

But there is an added benefit to this comparison: we can now gain some more tangible idea than ever before of exactly how Hamas has been spending the world’s billions and billions of dollars in aid, all these years.

We know what it costs to build a subway system. The digging, the wall construction, the arched ceilings for safety, the depth for security. The electrical wire and plumbing.

Now add the additional cost of doing all this construction in secret, to keep the tunnels hidden. The added cost of doing it under existing buildings rather than open fields. And we -- the West -- have been giving them the materials for this project, all along, without realizing it.

Hamas is a terror network, and it has spent our billions in building a war machine, not in caring for the non-Hamas residents, who have always been nothing more than future conscripts and human shields anyway, in the eyes of Hamas.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is Hamas the only foreign “legitimate government” misusing our foreign aid, and redirecting humanitarian relief for its own malevolent purposes?

Our government -- and the UN, and other such groups we fund -- all give an incredible amount of our money to foreign governments, and foreign organizations. Academia chooses for us which foreign groups to speak favorably about to our children, and which ones to oppose. Our business community donates incredible resources to the ones we’re supposed to like, and denies the requests of the ones we’re not.

Do any of them even make an effort to be as rigorous with the dollars they manage as we are with our own?

And is Hamas the only one they’ve gotten wrong?

Makes you wonder if perhaps we should take a long hard look at all the money and aid we send to foreign countries. There’s really no hard evidence, yet, to prove that Hamas is an outlier, is there?

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and trade compliance consultant. A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. Read 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, and the brand new Volume Three).

Image: Israeli Defense Forces