Where does Hamas get its funding?

In 2006, Hamas was duly elected as the majority party in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative council. This prompted the Israelis to demand Hamas denounce its genicidal charter, renounce violence as a means to a political end and work towards negotiating a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The short story is - Hamas refused and Israel withheld tax transfer payments to the Palestinian Authority. In late June 2006, Israel launched Operation Summer Rains in an attempt to release Hamas hostage Gilad Shalit who was taken hostage after Hamas infiltrated Israeli sovereignity in an operation designed to kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers in an attempt to extort the Israeli government to meet their demands. In June 2007, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in a military type coup against the Palestinian Authority, and hence, the alleged ‘blockade’ of the Gaza Strip.

I qualify the word ‘blockade” with an alleged because there never seems to be any shortages or deprivations on the scale of, say Arab 1947-48 blockade of the Ancient Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem - despite the hysterical over-whine of UNRWA officials.

All of which leads to the question – where does Hamas get its funding? Forbes sets out to answer this question in an article from this month’s magazine and you might be surprised at the scope and size of the suckers inadvertently bankrolling Hamas. I will quote only this little blurb from the end of the report as it contains an interestingly perverse notion:

In December 2008, under U.S. and international pressure, Israel delivered between $64 million and $77 million in cash to Gaza. When Hamas rocket attacks intensified, Israeli banks started refusing to transfer cash to Gaza. World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Tony Blair, who is now Mideast envoy for the E.U., Russia, the U.N. and the U.S., sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert complaining that such refusals are "counterproductive and ultimately harm Palestinian moderates." Clearly, the world community is set on seeing the terrorist group Hamas as legitimate. But demanding that Israel pay its own executioners goes way too far.

Quite right too, but there is this incredibly strange notion floating about which is this - if one kills off funding or stops actively bankrolling a totalitarian terrorist administrations it will harm or kill off political moderates….seems to me Hamas has been doing an outstanding job of killing off the moderates all by its lonesome - and while on the world’s dime too!