This is an article about identity-group politics and Darfur. the whole thing is well-worth reading. The following might illuminate Kelsey’s question about why Farrakhan, et al are not involved:
Slavery, Genocide and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New “Racial Olympics”
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer234/aidi.html
[…]
Reviving the Black-Jewish Alliance
American Jewish activism in Sudan did not begin with the explosion of state-sponsored killing in Darfur into the global consciousness. Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, has argued that Jews should be active in opposition to Sudanese slavery: “What can we former slaves do to help those in bondage today?”[51] Israel and Zionist organizations have long been interested in issues of race and ethnicity in the Arab world. Israel has a long record of training and arming groups in Kurdistan and southern Sudan “fighting for their freedom from [Arab] imperialism.”[52] The Zionist concern for minorities in the Arab world is strategic: by focusing on how Arab states (mis)treat their minorities, pro-Israel scholars can shift the spotlight from Palestine, highlight Arab double standards, demonstrate how the subordinate status of minorities in the Middle East necessitated a Zionist project to lift Middle Eastern Jews “up from dhimmitude” and show how Israel protects minority rights better than any other state in the region.[53] Given the American Jewish community’s silence over the Congo, Uganda and Sierra Leone, it seems the outrage over Darfur is as moral as it is political. “Now millions of African people face genocide and the UN’s top priority is condemning the Israeli security fence that saves lives on both sides of the security barrier,” stated Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY).[54] Moreover, Jacobs is also the founder of the David Project, which monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern studies on American campuses and promotes a Sudan divestment campaign expressly to counter the Israel divestment campaign. As Jacobs put it, “Israelis are put to a test that is not applied to anyone else. You will not hear any murmur about the people of Sudan but…Israel is singled out in a way that is racist.”[55]
Jewish activists’ involvement in Sudan activism—like African-American leaders’ support for Israel—is seen as a sign of “reciprocal respect” for each community’s historical suffering, a linking of the Holocaust and slavery that can close the social distance between blacks and Jews in America. In 2001, in an effort to ameliorate black-Jewish relations, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach tried to organize a trip for Michael Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton to Sudan that would help the King of Pop “reconnect to his people,” and then a trip to Israel for the reverend to meet with Israeli victims of terrorism. Although Jackson withdrew at the last minute and Sharpton angered trip organizers when he visited Yasser Arafat, many praised Sharpton’s trip to Sudan and Israel. “If Sharpton returns to New York proclaiming the Arab-Israeli conflict to be nuanced and complex with justice somewhere in the middle, it will have a positive impact on race relations in the city,” wrote one columnist. “On the fringe of black (and white) America are some, like Minister Louis Farrakhan, who are trying to sell a blame-the-Jews explanation of Islamic anti-Americanism. Personal witness by Sharpton that Israel isn’t the devil—or even the sorcerer’s apprentice—will make that kind of scapegoating harder.”[56] More recently, Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) flew to Darfur and then to Israel, with a symbolic trip to Yad Vashem, and likened the Darfur situation to the Shoah: “I think this ties together with the concerns I have about Darfur. I believe we must challenge the genocide there.”
The cause of Sudan has become a way to ease what some have sardonically termed the “comparative victimology” plaguing African- and Jewish-Americans.[57] Relations between African-American and Jewish communities began deteriorating in the late 1960s, for reasons including conservative Jewish opposition to affirmative action and left-leaning African Americans’ support for the Palestinian cause. As an angry Michael Lerner told Cornel West, “We have a genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda, and yet African-Americans have more to say about the undemocratic nature of Israel than they do about the oppression of blacks by blacks in Africa.”[58] But many have argued that the main reason for the tensions was that the Holocaust, as a tragedy, had gradually come to overshadow slavery in American political discourse. According to a 1990 survey, a clear majority of Americans, when presented with a list of catastrophic events, said that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history.”[59] As one historian put it, the “[African-American] grievance was that in America, the group that was by a wide margin the most advantaged was using European crimes to trump American crimes against what was, by an equally wide margin, the least advantaged group.“[60] Black criticism of this “hierarchy of victimization” goes back at least to 1979 when Rev. Jesse Jackson visited Yad Vashem and infuriated many when he described the Holocaust as “tragic but not necessarily unique.” More recently, Randall Robinson, the former president of TransAfrica whose book The Debt launched the debate over reparations in the US, observed, “Slavery was and remains an American holocaust. It lasted 20 times as long as the Nazi holocaust. It killed at least ten times as many people.” Yet while there is a Washington museum honoring the victims of the Nazi genocide and the Native Americans’ tragedy, “nowhere on the Mall can anything be found—monumental, memorial or stone tablet—to commemorate the hundreds of millions of victims of the American Holocaust.”[61][…]

interestingly, Kelsey, some might see you as a bigger threat than Mermelstein:
http://lists.btvshalom.org/pipermail/newsdigest-btvshalom.org/2004-July/000688.html
[Israeli officials] note that the emerging generation of European elites has less empathy with Israel than their predecessors, and no Holocaust guilt, meaning they would have fewer reservations about joining a Palestinian-inspired campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Kelsey,
Your arguments about Darfur were wrong, then, and they’re wrong now. Were you at the rally? Remember when you said that the NAACP and Al Sharpton would keep away because of Jewish involvement? That was factually incorrect paranoia back then, too. Both of them were in DC as speakers. The only people who might have stayed away were already marginalized bigots who wouldn’t have done anything for the movement anyway. I did see one counterprotest… those Lost Tribe of Israel maniacs that you see wearing in Halloween costumes in Times Square shouting about international Zionist conspiracy. There were about five of them total.
For all this self-aggrandizing talk about how all these unreasonable, patronizingly racist Jews won’t listen to your lone voice of reason, have you ever considered that you may be wrong?