We can respect the Muslims as fellow monotheists, we can help them by fighting (over there!) the tyranny of their kleptocrat leaders and mass murdering emirs, imans, and ayatollahs, but we are under no obligation to allow them into our country to preach and practice the modern day abominations of their religion.

Who is the Left and their heretical Christians, to tell real Christians what they should or shouldn’t do?

A great many Christians would be wrong. What you are describing is Leftism defining Christianity for the lukewarm Christian who gets their religion & theology from the main stream media.

This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.

You can read it all here.

The Christian missionaries had and have good intentions. Their first impulse was to bring the Good News of Christianity to the mostly animist natives in Africa. When they got there, they were appalled by the poverty. Their mission then evolved into trying to convert people and save their lives from hunger, disease, illiteracy,and warfare. For several hundred years they have been successful in converting many Africans to Christianity. Their efforts to fight poverty and disease have succeeded in increasing the population of Africa, but have failed to improve their ability to feed and care for themselves. There are great examples of this in “Dark Star Safari,” by Paul Theroux. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the 60s. He went back in 2000 to travel from Cairo to Capetown to see what had transpired in the days since his time in Africa. What he found was that all the idealism of his days in the Peace Corps had been dashed by retrogression in almost all areas of life in Africa. He found that the missionaries (and he encountered many), UN workers, and other NGO operatives had corrupted most of the recipients and even contributed to conflict within the continent. He found that most Caucasians working to provide aid were blind to the unintended consequences of their good intentions. It seemed enough for them that they felt morally good about trying to help the poor people of Africa. The good intentions were all that counted.

I have been to Africa and seen its poverty up close and personal. It breaks your heart. It especially breaks your heart because in most countries in Africa they have enough farmland, natural resources, and hard-working people to at least feed themselves and be relatively self sufficient, if not wealthy. What holds them back is tribalism in the form of dictatorships, oligarchies, and kleptocracies. The foreign aid only encourages and solidifies their inability to help themselves. It is pretty discouraging.

You mention Dr. Livingstone as an example of a missionary to look up to. Yes, he was a giant of his time, but he was more of an explorer than missionary. He contributed much to the knowledge of the Dark Continent. He loved the African natives and they loved him. He could not have foreseen what was to come. An outstanding book about Stanley and Livingstone and that period in Africa is, “Into Africa: The epic adventures of Stanley and Livingstone,” by Martin Dugard. Dugard is the historian who has been the co-author on Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing” series. His historical research and writing abilities are, IMO, why O’Reilly’s books have been so successful.

In the mid 19th century Islamic jihad against black Africans was in full force. The Muslims had invaded central Africa and were killing and enslaving Africans on a massive scale. They would march the newly minted African slaves out to the coast in chain gangs. These poor sick undernourished Africans were forced to march with elephant tusks on their heads. Many of the men were castrated out in the field. The castration often involved more than just testicles since the entire penis was removed.

The Britisher who was most influential missionary in fighting Muslim depredations in Africa was a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone (19 March 1813 — 1 May 187). The primary mission of the early British missionaries to Africa was to protect the Africans from Islamic jihad. David Livingstone and the other missionaries fought Islamic jihad against Africans primarily through education both in England where the English were alerted to the tragedy which was unfolding in Africa and in Africa where the Africans received the education necessary to enable them to repel the Muslim invaders. It is ironic that leftists accuse missionaries of destroying traditional African society and to some extent they did however since Christian missionaries relied on education and persuasion to win converts rather than by force they ended up saving much of what is uniquely African from the impending destruction by Islamic jihad.

The name of the modern day Islamic jihadis in central Africa, Boko Harem (roughly translated – Western education is a fraud which is forbidden in Islam) is not a fluke. The Islamists know exactly what the missionaries hoped to accomplish by establishing schools and hospitals throughout Africa and they hate them because they stand as bulwark against their violent jihad.

I was referring not to the overthrow of Gaddafi by Obama and NATO. I was referring to all the charity that has gone into Africa and the ME, which has only exacerbated their problems. Much like those hooked on welfare here in our inner cities, many of the countries of the ME and Africa have become unable to feed themselves. They are dependent on the good will of others. If you reside in such a country and someone; a cousin, brother, or friend; contacts you and suggests you come to a place where there’s welfare, some semblance of law and order, and no warfare, there is a great temptation to move to that place.

So, the unintended consequences to which I refer are all those years (1964 – present) of good works by missionaries, NGOs, and the UN. They have been carrying out the international version of LBJ’s War on Poverty, which has brought about many unintended consequences. Unless, of course, you think LBJ, the UN, Christian missionaries, and various NGOs intended to create poverty and anarchy. IMO, it’s not a vast conspiracy as much as the culmination of years of policies that don’t work.

Of course. They’re competing and they’re pragmatic. They don’t need to practice what they preach. They want you to practice what they preach.

On the one hand, we’re lectured to confine our religion to Sunday worship for things like same-sex marriage and abortion, yet when it pleases progressives, we’re supposed to pretend that it drives policy issues related to immigration and care for the poor.”

The Left is very selective in when it thinks the Right should be religious — the only principle is “does it further our agenda?”

That said, the LDS scriptures contain several practical applications of charity in the national sense (be smart about it) and in the personal sense, including this counsel in two similar but widely-separated situations: (1) charity is good, but “all things must be done in wisdom and order”;
(2) charity is good, but “behold, it is not requisite that a man run faster than he has strength.”