Remember the big news in 2003?

Paris Hilton’s sex tape.

The buzz was all over the Web and media. Almost everyone heard about it, and some even took great measures to find a copy of it.

Whether we liked her or not, we were bombarded by the image of Paris Hilton at some point or another that year and forced to think about this overrated celebrity.

To prove my point, let me quiz you. Who is Paris Hilton? Who is her on-and-off best friend? Which celebrity has she dated? What is happening in Darfur? What is the name of her ex-pet Chihuahua?

You probably passed with flying colors.

But did you skip the trick question?

What is happening in Darfur?

Yes. There are more important things than Paris Hilton’s eclectic collection of boy toys and her frequent unnecessary exposure of body parts.

While Paris Hilton is being photographed parading into a Beverly Hills nightclub, across the world men are being slaughtered, women raped, villages destroyed and civilians killed from disease and starvation in refugee camps.

If that didn’t paint a good enough picture, perhaps one word will — genocide.

Imagine a 4-year-old boy lying face down in the sand, apparently taking a nap. In fact, he is dead. Next to him lies his brother, just one year older, his face severely bashed in — unrecognizable. The blood on his face is black and dried up. He too is dead. Nearby is the corpse of their mother. All three dead. You don’t have to imagine it. This is the reality for many families in Darfur. Victims are not just killed. They are sexually abused. Men are castrated and women are raped.

More than 400,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million have fled to refugee camps.

The Janjaweed, an Arab militia, has been linked to the massacres occurring in this region of Sudan. The Sudanese government has not taken actions to stop the massacres because they depend on the Janjaweed to fight the two rebel groups present in Darfur. However, in recent months the militia group has become more ruthless to the point of even expanding to regions outside Darfur.

Many of us can recall Paris Hilton’s sex tape, the near marriage of Bennifer, and the Madonna-Britney kiss, which received instant exposure and coverage, but not many of us can recall that 2003 was the year the genocide in Darfur began.

It has been three years. But it took two whole years for our president to recognize the situation as genocide. Although George W. Bush has given the conflict in Darfur some awareness, actions are slow.

The reluctance to recognize the situation as genocide and the lack of action seem too familiar. Remember when 800,000 civilians were massacred in a time span of 100 days? That was the Rwanda Genocide of 1994.

Despite our intelligence of what was happening in Rwanda before the killing, we did not take actions. As a result, a massive number of civilians were slaughtered; a genocide we might have been able to prevent.

Now 12 years later, we are given the chance to prove that we have learned from our past.

To put it simply, Darfur needs help. Maybe when we are through gossiping about Hollywood celebrities and worrying about our precious oil, we will start to give more attention to the massive number of civilians dying in Darfur.

Hopefully, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, Darfur won’t have the same fate as Rwanda.