The Rev. Pat Robertson has been in a lot of hot water recently. His latest slip of the tongue, though, was a real doozy: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's massive stroke was God's retribution for "dividing the Holy Land."

Robertson was referring to the removal of Israeli settlements from Gaza, but he must have a very bad memory. The division of the Holy Land didn't begin with Sharon's Gaza fiasco.

It started more than 80 years ago, when European Zionists began moving in and trying to move out the peaceful native population, including Christians. In pre-Israel Palestine, Zionist terrorist gangs blew up buildings and massacred Palestinians.

The gangs' members included David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, who led the Haganah, in which Sharon was a 1942 recruit.

Begin even boasted that Haganah's massacre of more than 200 Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948 played a pivotal role in Israel's statehood. By that time, half the Palestinians had been dispossessed of their homes, land and livelihoods, and most wound up in refugee camps.

While it isn't nice to speak ill of someone near death, a little reality check is in order as Sharon becomes more revered by many Israelis and will be remembered by others as "the man who brought Israelis and Palestinians to the threshold of peace." Let's look at some highlights of his career:

• In 1953, Sharon and 300 of his Force 101 commandos raided the Palestinian village of Qibya. The official U.N. report says Sharon and his men drove 69 Palestinians into their homes and blew them up.

• In 1971, Sharon's troops destroyed 2,000 homes in Gaza, uprooting 12,000 Palestinians and making them refugees for a second time. He arrested hundreds of young Palestinian men, deported them to Jordan and Lebanon and exiled 600 relatives of suspected guerrillas to the Sinai.

• In 1982, Defense Minister Sharon invaded Lebanon and pushed to its capital, Beirut. He cut off all water, electricity and food supplies and bombarded the city for nine weeks, using thousands of bombs (including illegal cluster bombs) and at least 60,000 shells. Israel eventually admitted to 963 civilian deaths, but independent estimates put the figure at 12,000.

A separate, 11th-hour attack on West Beirut, led by Sharon, killed at least 300 civilians.

Sharon also is responsible for the slaughter of nearly 2,000 men, women and children in two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. International protests forced the Israeli government to temporarily demote Sharon to Minister Without Portfolio.

Sharon's Lebanese initiative cost close to 20,000 lives.

• Since becoming prime minister in 2001, Sharon has managed to despotically control the daily lives of Palestinians. Amnesty International reports that by the end of 2002, his army had killed more than 2,200 Palestinians (mainly civilians, including 380 children), detained without charge more than 7,200, demolished more than 3,000 homes, public buildings and water and electricity infrastructure and destroyed vast areas of agricultural land.

• Sharon's recent removal of illegal settlers in Gaza has its price for Palestinians. On the West Bank, his separation wall/fence continues to cut deeply into Palestinian land and violates international law. He has already annexed most of Arab East Jerusalem and is racing against time to expand illegal West Bank settlements.

When, if ever, the United States puts serious pressure on Israel to live up to the Bush administration's Mideast road map, only about 12 percent of Palestine will remain, leaving it so fragmented that its chances of being a viable state are dim. But that's the idea.

In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Gordon Levy wrote that Sharon's policies of "blatantly ignoring the existence of Palestinians ... their needs and desires" and his destruction of their governmental infrastructure have been the catalyst for most of the region's violence. He says they are "largely responsible for the strength of Hamas and the emergence of Hezbollah."

You can push people only so far.

So, if Robertson is right and God truly did cut down Sharon for "dividing the Holy Land," it wasn't because he extracted settlers from Gaza who had no right being there in the first place. It was because of the heinous crimes against humanity he committed in the Holy Land.

A man of peace Ariel Sharon is not. The world should choose its heroes more carefully.