Jehovah, a.k.a. "The Torpedo"

(CNN) -- Television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.

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Funny. I thought the land belonged to Israel, and they were turning it over to the Gaza Arabs. I mean, the Israelis did have a deed, or an army, or something which said they held sway, didn't they? (It was both; some deeds, more army, but still clearly theirs.)

"Dividing" the land assumes it's one land, and only one land and can be only one land. So I guess the United Nations' (future abode of the world government Antichrist) 1948 decision to partition the British Palestine mandate into two separate states, one the new state of Israel, was unGodly because it "divided" the land. Only then it was Arab land. Or at least the Arabs thought so.

Or it was one piece of Palestine mandate land. Except that the concept of Palestine could also mean to include the east side of the Jordan River, which the British gave to some of T.E. Lawrence's pals for service rendered during WW1.

Of course, Gaza was taken from the Palestinian Arabs by Egypt after the Israeli War of Independence, along with Jordan taking the West Bank. One could argue that the Egyptians further divided the land by taking area previously "divided" for a Palestinian Arab state.

Whew! You wonder how God kept up with all of this. He must use a Franklin planner to keep track.

Maybe this is why he's smote so haphazardly over the years. In 1949 He smote the UN's Count Bernadotte with a Jewish terrorist, but that hardly seems fair, since Bernadotte was a henchman, not the guy who carved in the first place.

In 1950 He smote the king of Jordan for taking the West Bank, using a Palestinian Arab to do his dirty work this time, but he left the Egyptians alone. Maybe He was still feeling guilty about all those plagues and locusts and rivers of blood and murdering the first born the last time he got between the Egyptians and Jews and wanted to let it ride this time. Anwar Sadat finally got it when He finally felt a little better about all that and needed to make up for lost time.

Yitzhak Rabin bought it when another religious crazy,one of Pat's own, exercised the grim judgment of the Lord for the Oslo Accords.

Now, God apparently has decided to get rid of the middlemen and pull the plug Hisownself, through a massive stroke. Maybe it's just too hard to get good help these days. Given the likely pollution in Sharon's arteries and whatnot after years of stress and overeating, it probably didn't take much more than a divine sneeze to do the job.

Personally, I don't take all this business of divine wrath very seriously. I just bought this nice little Pat Robertson doll from Madame Damballah's Haiti.online "curios" shop, complete with pins, straight from Haiti as a ... keepsake. Maybe I'll have a little fun with it.