Holy Shit!

I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to parse that title. I can come up with no other reaction to Pat Robertson's declaration that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's stroke was brought on by Sharon's displeasing God than that. "If thou dost rend Israel, my Holy Land, I shall rend and mightily clot the vessels in thy brain," as the old testament prophet Joel put it. Or at least that's the oracle of CBN/700 Club's interpretation, about which he seems fairly certain.

Me, I'm not quite so sure about Pat Robertson's exegesis of the scripture in question. I am certain that Robertson doesn't discriminate when it comes to his damning, sentencing to death, pronoucing of condemnation or interpreting of all things having to do with God. He's an equal opportunity asshole, just ask Hugo Chavez, the voters of Dover, Pa. and now Ariel Sharon. And those are just the most recent instances of his role as the loud and certain mouth of God that I can remember.

The most disturbing thing about his pronouncement is not that he made it--that's no surprise--it's what it reveals. An answer to the riddle, why do so many American Christian fundamentalists seem to support the state of Israel so strongly and unquestioningly? I'm not saying that Robertson speaks for all fundamentalists, but it's fairly clear that he's not a lone voice in the desert. The reason he identifies for Sharon's stroke, that it's God's punishment for dividing Israel, makes a clear statement about the underlying motives for much of the fundamentalist support for Israel as of late.

These motives seem to stem from two reasons: 1) the state of Israel plays an important role in "the end of days" or apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible for some fundamentalists, and 2) Israel is currently useful as an entity that protects the holy land from the Moslems "who seek to control, defile and use it for their own (ungodly) purposes"--in other words, the Jews are simultaneously instrumental and the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils that are convenient to keep around as long as they continue to do their job, but perhaps easily expendable when they cease to do so by "dividing up" the holy lands.

When I opined above that Robertson wasn't alone in his belief that Sharon's stroke was God's will, I didn't yet know who else was accompanying him through the difficult times of persecution that inevitably arise from speaking God's truth in a land of infidels--but now I do, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Well done Pat and President Ahmadinejad, you've made the similarities amongst fundamentalisms that we've all been talking about for so long absolutely concrete: this religious extremism equals that religious intolerance equals that religious purity. And for that, I say "amen" to you both.