...After I contacted Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser for comment before publication of last week's column, FP.com quickly excised dozens of the most egregiously anti-Semitic comments that stuck to Walt's posts. Perhaps they should have also vetted some of the links that Walt himself embeds for the edification of his readers. Consider this recent post where Walt has inserted a link under the name Ariel Sharon, which leads to a 2002 article on the Media Monitors Network website:

The name Safire, as in William Safire of the New York Times, is a name they recognize well at the State Department. He is one of the high priests of Sulzberger's New York Times empire which has a franchise to dictate terms to the State Department. Of course, it is Safire himself who appears to be taking in dictation work these days from his old pal, Ariel Sharon. Before you read on, note that the Boston Globe is also a publication owned by Sulzberger. Is their a civil war breaking out among the Yiddish Supremacists? Or is Sulzberger trying to deflect some of the damage that is bound to come his way as a result of transforming his media empire into just another corner of the Israeli Lobby? Who cares? Let Sulzberger explain his shadow government's antics.

With this link Walt shows that he hangs out in the same fetid places as some of his most paranoid commenters. And yet it is true, as some of my critics, including Walt, contend, that he and his colleagues are not responsible for the views of their readers. Walt is not accountable for the rabble that hang on his every word and who feel vindicated by the fact that their dark fantasies about Jews are enhanced by a veneer of academic reasoning from a Harvard professor. Nor can Walt be blamed for the fact that David Duke lauded his work on the Israel lobby's machinations in pushing the United States to war in Iraq. ("It is quite satisfying," wrote the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, "to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.") Even though a sewer follows Walt wherever he goes, he is not that sewer's keeper.

I did not feel the need to make the case that Walt himself is an anti-Semite. There are plenty of credible voices who have pursued that line of argument. They have made a case that the book he co-authored with John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was an anti-Semitic tract. Still others equally credible believe that Walt simply flirts with anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan has also been called to account, more than once, for combining his strident, conspiratorial denunciations of Israel, "Jewish neocons," and "the Israel Lobby," with his pronounced obsession with circumcision. Even as Glenn Greenwald and Phillip Weiss have both been accused of obscuring the plain facts behind their frothing rhetoric about Israel, I never claimed that they were of the hothouse flower variety of anti-Semite known as the self-hating Jew.

Whether or not these bloggers are anti-Semitic is precisely the argument Walt and the rest want to have and precisely the one I do not. Anti-Semitism is an idea held in the mind that finally can only be confirmed--and can always be denied--by the mind holding it. I can no more discern what these bloggers really think about Jews than I can know whether they are thinking about the color blue or green. To get bogged down in this argument deflects attention from the issue that I am interested in here, which is not a mental state, but a process, an activity in which all four men openly engage: Jew-baiting...