Bloggers are aghast that President Bush came out against a House resolution that would recognize the Armenian genocide. Also, Palestinians return to a Lebanese refugee camp formerly besieged by Islamists. And bloggers assess the discoveries made by this year's Nobel laureates in science.

What genocide? Beginning in 1915, up to 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered or displaced by the dying Ottoman Empire, an event that modern Turkey refuses to acknowledge, to the point of criminalizing the discussion of it. The House foreign affairs committee voted Wednesday 27-21 in favor of a symbolic resolution that would recognize the Armenian genocide, much to the chagrin of Turkey's Islamist government, one of the United States' strongest allies in the Middle East. President Bush said "this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings." Bloggers think otherwise.

El Matador, an Irish nationalist who writes at ElBlogador, thinksrealpolitik is back with a vengeance: "For Bush and many of his predecessors, it has nothing to do with what is right or wrong, but rather a question of what suits the American Presidency best. Morality and justice don't come into it. We saw the same sort of buffoonery during US interventions in Latin America in the 1970s. It seems that some people never learn."

"Guy Fawkes" at lefty Daily Kosis appalled: "No less a monster than Adolf Hitler, when asked by one of his subordinates about whether the world would sit back and watch while they massacred thousands of untermenschen, responded that nobody remembered now what happened to the Armenians. Now it is happening again."

Even some stalwart defenders of the administration can't stomach this latest maneuver. Conservative Pam at Atlas Shrugs writes: "If the President won't call genocide genocide and he won't utter the name of the mortal enemy we face, Islamism, we are in for a world of pain."

In a lengthy, informational post, Baron Bodissey at the Gates of Vienna looks at the issues that led acknowledgement of the atrocities to be repressed after World War I and then moves to present day, asking: "And why is our relationship with Turkey strained? What have we done to offend them? Is it strained because of that nasty little business in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, when the Turks denied the United States permission to enter northern Iraq via Turkey?" which caused "numerous additional American casualties, and allowed thousands of Baathists, criminals, and terrorists — who otherwise would have been interdicted by a northern front — to escape."

"The irony of someone named Bush jilting the Armenians," according to Countenance Blog, "is that, in 1988, the first George Bush had the Armenian-American Governor of California, George Deukmejian … on his short list for a running mate. I wonder how he feels today, as he sees the son of the man who might well have made him Vice-President diss his own people like this."

Finally, Joey Kurtzman, my colleague at Jewcy, has called for the firing of Anti-Defamation League Director Abe Foxman for the ADL's refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide. At the Daily Shvitz blog, Kurtzman reminds readers that George W. Bush once spoke differently about historical fact when he was trying to drum up support for his tax policy: "The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity."

Read more about Bush and the Armenian genocide.

Homeward bound: Today, 500 Palestinians returned to the Nahr al Bared refugee camp in Lebanon months after fleeing a battle scene between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam, a jihadist group. More than 30,000 residents had been displaced and their homes destroyed during the conflict.