You might have seen the latest viral TikTok over the weekend, which was made by Feroza Aziz, a 17yo Muslim girl. It began as an eyelashing curling video and wound up as a politics lesson about the camps that China has been putting Uighur Muslims into.
“So, the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously,” she says. “Then, you’re gonna put them down and use the phone you’re using right now to search what’s happening in China, how they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there.”
“This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it.”
The video has over 1.4 million views, and nearly 500,000 likes on TikTok. Somebody else took the video from TikTok to Twitter, where it’s racked up another five million views.
While the internet is chock-full of videos about makeup and beauty tips, it’s the first time that a video like this has been successfully used to spread a political message. It’s certainly the first time a beauty video has gone viral because of its point about human rights.
According to the Chinese government, the camps are for voluntary re-education, but only this week a data leak showed that the official instructions to people working at the camps are to make sure the camps were run like a high security prisons.
Instructions include to never allow escapes, increase discipline and punishment, to encourage repentance and confession, make sure that Mandarin studies are the top priority, and to “encourage students to truly transform.”
British human rights lawyer, Ben Emmersons, has said of the camps that “It is very difficult to view that as anything other than a mass brainwashing scheme designed and directed at an entire ethnic community.”
In an interview, Feroza said that “As a Muslim girl, I’ve always been oppressed and seen my people be oppressed, and always I’ve been into human rights.”
“I just wish I could do more to help. I hope something can be done from this.”