As a Muslim woman living in the West, who is unfortunately too invested in the news cycle, Im all too aware of the fracturing human rights of Muslims across the globe. I wish this was an exaggeration but the collective experience of Muslims around the globe including the persecution of Uighur Muslims in China has made me long fear that, one day, a genocide against Muslims like me could become reality closer to home.

I stopped believing that those with the most power, those who reach the highest political offices, are driven by decency or humanity or the desire to make the world a better place a long time ago. Around the world, politicians and leaders like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Narendra Modhi have made it vogue to be openly Islamophobic.

This has created a hostile and fearful environment because it seems to be politically beneficial to be Islamophobic. It is now so normalised in our society that the general public has become desensitised to the abuses of Muslims across the world.

Whether its unfairly punishing an adult for a childs mistakes by making them stateless in the case of Shamima Begum. Or suddenly mandating everyone should wear facemasks in Europe following a burqa ban and years of stigma and abuse towards those who covered their faces for religious reason. In the UK niqabi Muslim women were labelled letterboxes and bank robbers, and a recent headscarf ban in Belgian universities restricted access to education for women.

Lets also not forget the Muslim ban in America, which stopped the travel of mostly Muslims entering the US a Virginia judge later ruled this ban as unconstitutional because there was a religious bias. The Citizenship Bill introduced in India last year, also known as the anti-Muslim law, offered amnesty to all refugees in India except Muslims. The law delegitimises Indian Muslims in the country who had long since been there without any citizenship protections and would not be viewed as illegal immigrants.

This everyday degradation by those in power and erasure of autonomy dehumanisies us and encourages others to do the same. If you treat people like they arent even a human then thats how society will eventually perceive them.

Recently the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab publicly acknowledged the human rights abuses happening in China against Uighur Muslims. It was a gesture but thats all it was. Currently, there is a mass ethnic cleansing going on in China of Uighur Muslims but the rest of the world sits in ignorance or watches without taking action despite promises of never again. History is repeating itself.

In a BBC Panorama documentary, anthropologist Dr Adrian Zenz said: The world should acknowledge what this is, the largest internment of an ethnic minority since the holocaust. Since Raabs comments and the British Governments acknowledgements, the Muslim Council of Britain has asked that the Government follow up its condemnation, urging for sanctions against China to be imposed, and strong diplomatic power used before Uighur Muslims are subject to total destruction at the hands of the Chinese Government.

The US has recently imposed some sanctions in China due to the treatment of Uighur Muslims but they are fairly tame, with other countries simply turning a blind eye or being unwilling to question China.

More than a million Muslims have been placed in internment camps, according to human rights groups. China has claimed these they were correctional camps to help young people have a better life, but last year a document leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed that camps were basically run as high-security prisons where inmates had to seek permission for moving their bodies as well as being subjected to rigorous brainwashing and physical and sexual abuse. Recent reports claimed that Uighur Muslim women have been forcibly made to take birth control in an attempt to suppress the population.

In a recent BBC interview with Andrew Marr, the British-Chinese ambassador denied ethnic cleansing even after Marr quoted Chinese government statistics on population growth which said that the Uighur population in Xinjiang had fallen by 84 per cent in between 2015-2018. The ambassador responded with thats not right.

Though not surprising, the most deafening silence for me comes from the wider international Muslim community. In 2019 Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates blocked a motion led by Western ambassadors at the United Nations which called for China to allow independent international observation in the Xinjiang region.

Chinas actions unchallenged will further embolden global Islamophobia

It seems the same countries that were so enraged by drawings of the Prophet arent willing to intervene or even condemn a real-life mass ethnic cleansing of Muslims because it will not politically advantageous to them. At a press conference last year when Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was asked about Chinas treatment of Uighur Muslim he admitted that Pakistans response to China was reflective of the help Pakistan had received from China when the country was at rock bottom.

Chinas actions unchallenged will further embolden global Islamophobia and yet it seems China is invincible even as it commits human rights abuses. So the question here is will any of the so-called global superpowers do anything? Or is politicking more important than basic human rights? Because right now the international community isnt doing anything to help Uighur Muslims and the silence is deafening.

There might not be internment camps in the Western world right now but internment is not the only way to dehumanise and oppress groups on mass. I fear that the everyday oppression of our rights in the West could one day lead to the erasure of Muslims and the Muslim identity.

Mariam Khan is the editor ofIts Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race

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The world has stood by as China persecutes Uighur Muslims - and it makes me fear for my safety - iNews