Genocide is okay if its purpose is to stop man-animal sex, Pat Robertson explained today on the 700 Club.

When a viewer asked the televangelist about Old Testament accounts “where God told his people to wipe out cities and take their lands,” noting that it “sounds like Islam to me,” Robertson responded that God was actually showing mercy on the annihilated peoples because otherwise they would pass their sinful ways onto their children and grandchildren.

Assuming you have a culture that has 1,000 really bad people in it — they’re murderers, they’re thieves, they’re rapists, they’re having incest, you name it they are doing everything horrible — now if they have children, what’s going to happen? Instead of having 1,000, you’ll have 3,000 or 4,000; then — nothing has changed them — then they’ll pass it on to the next generation and the next thing you know you’ve got 10,000 or 20,000 of them and if it keeps on going you’re going to have a million of them. So what’s the most merciful thing for a loving God to do? It’s to take the thousand and get rid of them. And that’s what He did.

“It sounds cruel but in the long run it’s more merciful,” he continued. “Further, He didn’t want his people to be contaminated by those people…. They had sex with animals, they had incest, they did all of these terrible things and they offered their children as sacrifices to their gods, it was horrible what they did.”