Europe’s rising  Islamophobe crowds  have joined forces halfway across the globe with none other than Myanmar’s  Nobel Peace laureate and current ethnic cleansing denier Aung San Suu Kyi. Her agreement with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán on the ‘Muslim threat’ should add to the growing alarm bells of a rather chilling and contemptible xenophobic campaign. The meeting of the minds comes in the wake of the massacre of 54 worshippers in two mosques in New Zealand, three months ago.

The two controversial leaders described Muslims as one of the biggest threats facing their countries, according to a Hungarian Government statement issued after their macabre meeting in Budapest this month. ‘Both regions have seen the emergence of the issue of coexistence with continuously growing Muslim populations,’ it ominously warned, citing that migration was among ‘the greatest challenges at present for both countries and their respective regions – southeast Asia and Europe.’

Their collusion meeting comes after Suu Kyi’s fall from grace for failing to speak out in the face of the latest ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. More than 700,000 fled to neighbouring Bangladesh in the wave of massacres and rapes committed by the military. The UN was in no doubt about the scale of the slaughter in 2017, describing the mass killings of Rohingyas as ‘textbook genocide’.

For decades, the youngest daughter of Aung San, the hailed founder of modern-day Burma (Myanmar) was proclaimed as a figurehead of opposition to the excesses of the ruling military junta in the former British colony. As early as 1991, she even became a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, not that many of the laureates have avoided controversy with the likes of Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to name but two of the previous dubious winners.

In 2015 her election to the post of State Counsellor – de facto head of the Government – was hailed as a sea-change moment in the history of Myanmar. Yet four years on Suu Kyi has become a global pariah at the head of a regime that has excused the genocide of Muslims, locked up critics and journalists. Suu Kyi has been exosed as a  little more than a mouthpiece that has continued to hold power, despite the supposed ending of the ruling junta.

In blatantly denying the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, the once feted democracy and human rights champion is now ironically colluding with a genocidal junta. Maybe it is only for Buddhist nationalism and with Orbán for supremacist Christianity standing side-by-side against the proclaimed existential threat of Islam. There have been worrying signs too in China and in Narendra Modi’s India.

Worryingly in Britain, some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric can be heard within the ruling Conservative Party, the right-wing Brexit Party and the remains of UKIP. It has substantiated by much of the press and is spread across Europe but more so, much of the rest of the world. Muslims are the scapegoat for many of the world’s ills with threats too daunting to think about with no voices speaking out.