Deborah Lipp

Usually Pat Robertson’s declarations on politics are evil, wrong-headed, or hilarious, in some combination. But his latest is just completely muddled.

Sharon had a stroke as punishment for “dividing God’s land?” You know that weird sound that Lewis Black makes when he’s so confused that his cheeks shake back and forth? I’m making that sound right now.

Let’s set aside the part where Robertson sees God’s hand in selected situations, but not in other situations that don’t make his evil, wrong-headed, hilarious point. Let’s forget that all manner of overweight, overworked, stressed-out 77 year-olds have strokes, even if Robertson isn’t directing God’s wrath towards them. Let’s just, y’know, skip all that.

Dividing God’s land? WTF? (Dear Lady of the Stars, Robertson has made me use the despised “WTF”—I must truly be losing it.) Does Robertson not know that Israel has already been divided many, many times? That Israel today is smaller than Biblical Israel? That after the Six-Day War, the land was redivided? That it was redivided again after the Yom Kippur War? Were there lots of strokes and TIAs during that period?

But what’s really bothering me is the very notion of “dividing God’s land.” Is it less God’s if it’s not occupied by Israel? Are Palestinians not God’s people? Don’t Christians like Robertson believe that all humanity is born of Adam and Eve? If so, aren’t Palestinians included in that?

It must be hard to sleep at night when your theology is so twisted. I think it must twist up the bedsheets too, or something.