Or maybe you don't. After all, it has not been in the news recently, and not only because Hussein is shutting out the journalists. Fashion matters and today the fashion is to ignore genocide. Quite rightly, the crimes of American, British, European and Israeli democracy are dissected and denounced.

But an intellectual blockage - a Chinese wall in the mind - prevents the critics applying universal principles to far greater outrages. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made my point for me in Sudan last week.

Anyone who had heard the Church of England's censure of Israel might have expected to see a primate filled with righteous wrath. Consider his opportunities. While he was there, the genocide was continuing in Darfur.

The victims were black Muslims, but strangely, the Muslim world has not revolted against the Islamist murderers and torched Sudanese embassies. In the name of inter-faith solidarity, Dr Williams might have found the words of reproach they lacked. If he didn't want to talk about Darfur, there was the decades-long civil war, which has seen the enslavement of the Christian Dinka tribe in the south and two million dead, more than in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined.

On a visit to a church in Khartoum, the fearless archbishop told the congregation: 'It will be a joy to share with fellow Christians in Britain what... I have learnt from you.' What he had learnt was a history of massacre, slavery and second-class citizenship, but he didn't mention it.

The next stop was the Sudan Inter-Religious Council in Khartoum. This might have been the place to lay into the dictatorship's murder and persecution of Sudanese Christians. Instead, he confined himself to saying: 'We are at peace with God when we face our failings with honesty.' And so it went on.

He travelled through a country torn by religious mania and genocide without mentioning religious mania and genocide.

His office said he was picking his words with the care of a diplomat because his main concern wasn't the genocide in Darfur in the west of Sudan but the faint hope of a peace deal in the equally gruesome civil war between the Muslim north and Christian south, which he didn't want to jeopardise.

In any case, his lecture to his Islamist hosts on facing 'our failings with honesty' was strong stuff by inter-faith standards. It may be tough talk if Anglicans are talking to Catholic bishops, but I doubt very much if it would have reduced the psychopaths of Khartoum to trembling penitents.

To me, the failure of the archbishop to speak plainly was not a sign of his diplomacy, but flowed from his row with the Jews. Before he escaped to Africa, he couldn't say why he wanted sanctions against Israel but not against countries that committed far worse crimes - China, Syria, Iran, North Korea and, indeed, Sudan - or give any indication that he was morally obliged to provide an answer.

A few of his critics just wanted to protect Israel come what may. Others were concerned about the retreat from universal principle into relativism.

If you say there must be higher standards for democracies, you inevitably betray the victims of dictatorships by blocking your mind from thinking clearly and shouting loudly about their suffering. The confusion isn't confined to the General Synod of the Church of England.

The United Nations tried to suppress a report that named the alleged war criminals of Darfur, in a way that it would never have suppressed the names of alleged torturers at Guantanamo. On the blacklist was that friend of freedom, Mr Hussein. While he was ranting at the journalists, he said that if the UN sent troops to protect the people of Darfur, al-Qaeda would flood the country.

'Darfur will become the graveyard for the United Nations,' he promised with what sounded like inside knowledge. Isn't that an extraordinary threat for a UN member to make? Why isn't every liberal newspaper and liberal party fulminating? Because genocide is out of fashion, dear.

It may make a retro return in 2008, say, or 2009. Books called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed will win literary prizes. Lachrymose documentaries will appear on BBC2, probably narrated by Fergal Keane. The Church of England will apologise, as it invariably does. They will all cry: 'Never again!' And at that precise moment, it will be happening again.

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