Last week, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published a piece ostensibly about the plight of poverty in Afghanistan due to severely reduced foreign aid. Here is how the Beeb chose to title the piece: “Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices.”

According to South Asia and Afghanistan correspondent Yogita Limaye, Afghan fathers who have no other means of getting food for their families are forced to sell their daughters into sexual slavery. She gave two prominent examples.

One father, Abdul Rashid Azimi, brought his seven-year-old twin daughters with him to the town square, where “he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work.” According to Abdul, “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years.”

Another father purportedly sold his five-year-old daughter to a relative for marriage because she had a ruptured appendix and a cyst on her liver. To pay for her medical bills, she was sold as the child bride of one of the relative’s sons. She wouldn’t have to marry at five, the article assures readers; the pedophiles would wait until she was 10.

The BBC attempts to sympathize with the fathers in this story. Afghanistan is impoverished, and when the U.S. and the UK stopped sending aid (because the country is once again run by the Taliban terrorist group), these poor fathers have to sell their children.

Of course, what is studiously avoided in Limaye’s article is the reality that fathers selling their daughters at very tender ages is not a new phenomenon in this culture. Nor does it take a lack of material aid or starvation to drive these men to engage in this horrid act. Selling girls is a centuries-old, culturally accepted practice that would still be happening regardless of whether there was extreme poverty.

In Afghanistan, the predominant religion is Islam. And whose teachings do Muslims follow? The “prophet” Muhammad’s. For those who might be unaware, Muhammad himself had a child bride. Aisha was Muhammad’s third wife, whom he married when she was six, though the marriage wasn’t consummated until she was nine. In Afghanistan, selling young daughters is a practice modeled after their pedophilic prophet.

The BBC also seeks to sugarcoat the truth. Notice the first part of the title reads, “Selling children to survive…” Boys are not sold. It is typically the girls. The BBC does admit this later in the article, but it is a crucial point. Girls are treated as second-class citizens without agency or real protection beyond that of their fathers’ beneficence and the good fortune of providence.

Readers of all stripes were outraged by this insidious article. A Community Note posted on X added this context:

BBC frames Afghan fathers selling daughters as sympathetic. All profiled cases involve girls (e.g. 5-year-old). Selling daughters for marriage is a longstanding cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan. BBC focuses on fathers’ distress over outcomes for the girls (rape).

Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey added:

No one is being “forced” to sell their 5-year-old daughters to pedophiles. They are voluntarily doing this to make money, as they have in the Middle East for centuries. Any half-decent father would starve to death before selling his child to a rapist. These are evil men making evil choices justified by an evil religion and normalized by an awful culture. And, bonus: it’s being imported into the West en masse

Allie’s words echo the warnings from Dr. Gad Saad, a scholar at the University of Mississippi’s Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. Saad, who is trying to dissuade Americans from their “suicidal empathy,” explained, “If you’re not in the least bit empathetic, you’re likely to be a psychopath, if you are too empathetic, if it hyperactivates, if it targets the wrong people in the wrong circumstances, then that becomes suicidal empathy.”

Being compassionate without being discerning is destructive, and Saad argues that this tendency to empathize with people who do not deserve it is killing our culture. Last week’s BBC article is a prime example.

Afghan fathers who sell their daughters are not sympathetic figures. They are monsters. Furthermore, blaming the West for the problems Afghanistan brought upon itself is not only shortsighted but simply incorrect. The BBC seeks to defend the indefensible in favor of a religious identity that would never do the same for them.

You cannot reform a culture like that unless you are bringing them to Christ — the only One who can soften such hardened hearts. It was Christ’s teachings that set the West apart from the world. It was Christianity that proposed the idea that everyone was of equal worth regardless of age, sex, or ability. It was Christianity that laid the groundwork for the great deeds and advancements in our own society. That is the truth of which the BBC needs to be reminded.

The British Empire was built not upon Islamism but upon the traditions of the church, and importing people from non-Christian traditions has decimated the British people. For example, women in the United Kingdom are still victims of imported rape gangs led by men from Islamic countries.

The UK has fallen prey to suicidal empathy and no longer has the strength to call evil what it is — especially if that evil is coming from an Islamic country and they can blame the fallout on the West.