Terrorists can't be charities

Terrorists can't be charities

By Bill Maher, 8/4/2003

EW RULE: Terrorist organizations can't also be charities. You can't
spend half your time building hospitals and schools and half your time
blowing them up. For one thing, it would confuse President Bush, who
won't know if you're with us, against us, or faith-based.

As the recent, long-awaited report on 9/11 made clear - especially if
you can read through a black Sharpie - claiming you're a ''charitable
organization'' is second only to saying ''religion'' when you want to
make people lie down and let you get away with something criminal.
People like the Saudis can get away with giving money to people like
Hamas by saying, ''Hey, they're a charity, too.''

Yeah, Habitat for Inhumanity. They help out around the neighborhood by
providing blankets for the elderly, food for the hungry, and hate-filled
books for the schools. They're a charity, see? They take pride in
showing troubled, disillusioned kids that drugs aren't the answer:
suicide is. They're like the Girl Scouts if they were backed up by
massive firepower.

Groups like Hamas say, ''Don't judge us because, besides bombings and
murder, we also provide valuable community services.'' Yes, and
McDonalds has salads now - it doesn't make them a health food
restaurant. You can't claim you're part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation if
the wish is always to drive every Jew in the world into the sea. Mothers
Against Drunk Driving can't also be a ring of call girls - although
we've all heard the rumors.

The point is, you can't do and be everything at the same time. That's
why President Bush always waits a week between wars before he proposes
another tax cut for the rich.

His next move on the war on terror, if he's finished overseas for a
while, should be to confront this mindset that accepts the paradox of a
''terrorist charity.'' To far too many Muslims in the world, feeding
children and knocking down the World Trade Center can both be considered
''good works,'' and that's how Hamas stays in business.

But we in the rest of the world don't have to buy into this insane
contradiction. Certain Euroweenies won't even classify Hamas as a
terrorist organization because of Hamas's record of ''public
assistance.'' They're not even denying that Hamas carries out terror
acts, they're just saying, ''What, a canned good drive counts for nothing?''

It reminds me of how certain neighborhoods in Queens shrugged off John
Gotti's murder and extortion because he threw a nice block party. Or how
the IRA's Widows and Orphans Fund turned out to be staffed by the same
people who were creating all the widows and orphans.

If we don't take a stand now, people will come to believe Hamas really
is a legitimate charity, and then we'll start getting come-ons from them
in the mail, and Pam Anderson will have to start showing up at their
fund-raisers. No one wants to see Joan Rivers on the red carpet with
Yasser Arafat.

So, come on - we broke up the phone companies, can't we separate
''charity'' from ''murder club''? Wouldn't that be a start? And if we
can accomplish that, then I predict that one day in the future, when
Palestinians and Jews are living side by side in harmony, all of us
sitting here today - will have been dead for 1,200 years.

Bill Maher is host of the television show ''Real Time with Bill Maher.''