issue to bring attention primarily to themselves and their pure moral values. In the process, Farrow and co have helped to warp public understanding and debate about Darfur.

Celebrity activists like Farrow, George Clooney, Matt Damon and others continually present the conflict there in super-simplistic, almost colonialist terms, as a cut-and-dried case of barbarous Africans in Khartoum seeking to wipe out pathetic Africans in Darfur. Farrow says "evil" is stalking Darfur. Clooney went so far as to say: "It's not a political issue. There is only right and wrong."

In truth, the conflict is complex and complicated. One expert points out that where, in 2006, there were two main rebel groups in Darfur opposed to Khartoum, they have since split into more than 30 groups, "in a development wearily familiar to Monty Python fans". And these rebel groups are not stuffed with innocent nice guys.

Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government at Columbia University in New York, has stingingly attacked celebrities like Farrow for their "reduction of a complex political conflict to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims".

Indeed, Farrow's reliance on fact-lite hyperbole over facts was brilliantly illustrated the day after she ended her "hunger strike". She had been protesting against the deaths of Darfurians as a result of Khartoum's recent expulsion of foreign aid agencies, yet a UN official said there was "no hard evidence" that more people had died as a result of the "disrupted aid effort".

And yet Farrow has such a childish, reductionist view of Darfur that, last year, she met with the CEO of Blackwater – the mercenary outfit that caused so much mayhem in Iraq – to ask him if would send some military men to "protect people" in Darfur. Is she serious? The Darfur Diet might be good for Western celebs, helping them to lose weight AND look caring, but such cheap stunt-mongering could prove disastrous for people in Sudan. Farrow is hungering for Darfur, and thirsting for war.