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today's blogs: The latest chatter in cyberspace.

Mahmoud's List

By Christopher Beam
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006, at 5:41 PM ET

Bloggers deny the Iranian Holocaust convention's right to exist, contemplate the Saudi ambassador's sudden departure, and joust over airport Christmas trees.

Mahmoud's list: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opened a two-day Holocaust conference, with a speaker list that includes former KKK imperial wizard David Duke. Israeli, Vatican, and United States officials denounced the event, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "shocking beyond disbelief." Bloggers make those criticisms look tame.

Conservative "ALa" at Blonde Sagacity decries the "obvious lunacy" of denying such a "heavily documented historical event": "[W]hat struck me was Iran 'celebrating' this 'conference' as proof of free speech in their theocratic land. Deny the Holocaust and it's free speech, but be a Blogger and be put in prison. Makes sense."

At National Review's The Corner, conservative Michael Ledeen praises the courage of the university students who chanted "death to the dictator" and burned pictures of Ahmadinejad at a speaking event: "[T]hink about the willful ignorance of the misnamed 'experts' in the equally misnamed 'intelligence community,' who, along with an astonishing number of cynical intellectuals, insist that there really is no effective opposition to the regime in Iran." But Matt at Steaming Pile figures "there is a pretty good chance that we may never hear from some of those 60 people again."

Conservative Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz claims on The Huffington Post that his longtime detractor Norman Finkelstein was originally scheduled to speak, although he's not sure Finkelstein attended: "Finkelstein certainly fits comfortably into the hate club, since he has allied himself closely with the Holocaust denial movement by trivializing the suffering of its victims and denying that many of them were victims at all."

Greg at Rhymes With Right ponders the foreign-policy implications: "[I]s this a nation that we can allow to get nuclear weapons, especially given the stated objective of its president to complete the task tha he denies hitler began?"

Businessman Joe Gelman at Neocon Express upbraids the members of Neturei Karta, a small anti-Zionist sect of Judaism, who showed up to the conference: "I find these folks far more repulsive than the capo Jews that worked as assistants to Nazi concentration camp guards. At least capo Jews were trying to save their own skin under horrible circumstances. These 'Jews' rush off to Iran under no duress to play footies with a holocaust denier who openly wishes to perpetrate another one."

Read more on Iran's Holocaust conference.

Faisal Goes East: Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, flew out of Washington Monday, saying after only 15 months of service that he wants to spend more time with his family. The Washington Post speculates that he may be returning on account of his ailing brother, Prince Saud al-Faisal, but bloggers aren't so sure.

BooMan at liberal Booman Tribune calls the departure an "earth-shaking event in the foreign policy establishment" that "could indicate severe tensions in the U.S./Saudi relationship. …Perhaps they have determined that Bush's strategy is fundamentally incompatible with their interests."