Is the BBC 100 Women List insidious propaganda?

This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation. I wanted to talk a little bit about this list that was recently published by the BBC of the 100 most inspiring women of 2021, and they dedicated half of the list to Afghani women. First of all, is this propaganda? Well, of course, it is, and it doesn't even pretend to be anything else.

It's a list of personalities subjectively defined as inspiring with the explicit aim of lauding these women as heroic figures that BBC readers and viewers and visitors to their website could admire while having their morning cup of tea or coffee. It's not a news story and doesn't purport to be one. Okay. But if it's propaganda, to whom is it directed? Is the aim to reach the Muslim world and infect our people with liberal ideas and influence Muslim women and promote feminism in the ummah?

Seems unlikely. About half of the BBC's total visitors are from The US, UK, Australia, and Canada, and the rest are distributed throughout most of the Commonwealth countries, English speaking countries. Despite being available in over 40 languages, the BBC is still failing to reach most non English speaking people around the world. So it's fair to surmise that the target audience for this little piece of propaganda is not the Muslims. Now here it's necessary maybe to talk a little bit about the BBC itself.

The BBC is funded by the British public and it is subject to periodic reviews by the office of communications to evaluate the extent to which the BBC continues to deserve that funding. Now this automatically means that the primary audience to whom the BBC seeks to appeal is the British public. Now the last evaluation of the BBC by the office of communications, Ofcom, found that the BBC was largely viewed as representing a white, middle class, London centric point of view. And they stated that the BBC had to do more to showcase diversity across all of their platforms. In fact, diversity on and off camera is something that the BBC is required to make a priority pretty stringently, essentially forcing the BBC to set quotas for different identity groups to work on and off camera and to be represented in news stories.

So this is one obvious consideration that helps explain the decision to devote 50% of the women on that list to Afghani women. Another consideration is that roughly half of the British public objected to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a majority of British citizens support granting asylum status to Afghani refugees in The UK. Thus, a list showcasing Afghani women as heroic and inspiring characters would naturally appeal to the sentiments and sympathies of the BBC's main constituency. It's actually a rather maudlin bit of political correctness and diversity pandering. Now before the BBC published that list, they did announce that it was their intention to dedicate half of the list to Afghani women, basically announcing that they had fixed for themselves a quota of Afghani women, giving themselves a target that they had to meet.

This is why, in my opinion, many of the names on that list seem somewhat negligible in their importance and. Inspiringness. The BBC needed to get 50 Afghani women, and they were gonna get them no matter how frivolous they may be. Now there's a reason why the BBC is viewed as skewing towards middle class white people, and that is because the BBC skews towards middle class white people. And middle class white people are the main proponents of wokeism, and they are the type of people who will bask in the light of their own halos as they pretend to admire and be inspired by Afghani women, poets, football players, and so called activists.

This piece of propaganda, this project, this list of inspiring women is for them, and they're the only ones reading it. This is the BBC pandering to their core audience, no more, no less. Having said that, we should not use this somewhat laughable list as a way to deny or dismiss the very real problems faced by women in Afghanistan, both now under the new Taliban government and from years before. The situation in Afghanistan has been horrific for decades, basically, my whole lifetime. And in many ways, it has been and continues to be particularly bad for women.

So don't let yourself ignore this reality just because you want to defy feminism. Don't fist bump the Taliban just because you hate liberals. Of course, don't believe everything that the Kufar say about Afghanistan or anything else, but also don't dismiss it out of hand just because it happens to be Kufar who was saying it. Verify your information and tell the truth no matter who dislikes it and no matter who likes it and no matter how distasteful it may be for you yourself. Otherwise, you'll just be another pandering propagandist like the BBC.