This week the British Broadcasting Corporation flew halfway around the world to find a sad story that it could blame on (1) America and (2) climate change.
Their drama opens in Afghanistan’s Ghor province, where fathers line up before dawn at a dusty square hoping to find a day’s work. One man weeps that he is preparing to sell his seven-year-old daughter to feed the rest of his children.
The reporter then explains how nearly five million Afghans are food deprived; she goes on to describe graveyards of dead infants, and then tells the story of another man who already sold his five-year-old daughter for about $3,200.
It is all genuinely terrible. But when the BBC starts explaining WHY any of this is happening— is where the journalism ends and the propaganda begins.
Famine, in almost every modern case, is not a weather event. It is a political outcome.
Afghanistan has fertile river valleys and enough arable land to feed several times its current population. Whenever a country is starving, it is due to bad policy— not bad soil.
It was the same issue when Venezuela ran out of food a few years ago. People were starving. Supermarkets were stripped bare. Zoo animals turned up on dinner plates.
Yet Venezuela has a tropical climate, a year-round growing season, abundant water, and some of the most productive farmland on the planet.
It really takes a special kind of incompetence to starve citizens in a place like that. And the same kind of incompetence is at work in Kabul at the hands of the Taliban overlords.
The BBC mentions none of this. Instead it points the finger at the legacy media’s two favorite villains: Donald Trump and climate change.
To make the case, the reporter sits down with a senior Taliban official, who insists that their regime “inherited poverty, hardship, unemployment and other problems”.
These “problems” were entirely due to the US presence, he explains, which had built “an artificial economy due to the influx of US dollars.”
In other words, the men who reconquered the country, kicked girls out of school, and locked half the workforce in their homes, are blaming their economic problems on the US investing too much money in Afghanistan.
Yet the BBC nods along enthusiastically.
Ironically, despite blaming America’s substantial investments in Afghanistan for the country’s problems, the Taliban’s solution is for America to give them more money.
“Humanitarian assistance should not be politicized,” said the Taliban spokesman, parroting the exact talking that point Western NGOs use to demand more no-strings cash for regimes that whip women in public.
The BBC nods along enthusiastically again.
They follow this up with more emotional propaganda, telling stories of dead babies and infant graveyards, all to tug at the heartstrings of their readers.
Then comes their coup-de-grace: blasting the Trump administration for cutting nearly all US aid to Afghanistan last year. The unspoken conclusion is that America is responsible for a graveyard of dead Afghan babies.
The naïveté is breathtaking. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that a single dollar in aid to the Taliban will end up in the hands of the old man sobbing at the labor square, and not in the hands of the warlords?
We do not have to guess.
A US Inspector General report found that at least $293 million in foreign aid earmarked for Afghan NGOs had already been stolen by the Taliban after they took the country in 2021. A large part of this was through fake NGOs that the regime invented to defraud donor nations.
The only thing that “humanitarian assistance” in Afghanistan actually buys is a better-funded Taliban.
What is most extraordinary is that this came from the British Broadcasting Corporation.
They didn’t need to fly halfway across the world to find children going hungry, being abused, or being sold. Britain has each of those stories on its own soil.
For nearly two decades, organized grooming gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men raped thousands of underage British girls, some as young as ten.
Yet police, social workers, and hospital staffs dismissed the obvious signs. And the BBC had remarkably little to say about any of it.
This raises the BBC’s other unspoken conclusion: “we” need to help these people by bringing more of them into the West.
Think about it: if men from this culture are willing to buy and sell their own children, imagine what they’re willing to do to yours.
Yet these are the values that Western politicians want to import into Europe and North America as a glorious example of multiculturalism. And anyone who has a problem with this is a racist Islamophobe.
Inspired Idiots like the BBC are the very reason it makes sense to have a Plan B.
