Are anti-Islamic American bloggers morally culpable for the murderous attacks in Oslo?

Or are they like the Beatles, whose song “Helter Skelter” was tragically misused by Charles Manson?

That question has been bouncing through the blogosphere since Anders Behring Breivik’s 1,500 anti-Muslim manifesto was posted online last Friday. (Slate has posted a video by Breivik, which functions as a trailer for the dense tract.)

As the NYT notes, Breivik had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

“His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch website, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.”

Get Religion dismissed the link between Breivik and American bloggers as “guilt by footnote association”

But commenters on the site, notably religion journalist Jeff Sharlet, pushed back.

“It’s oddly defensive and beside the point to cry `guilt by association,'” Sharlet writes. “The question here is not one of guilt – that’s clear and established… – but of intellectual formation.”

Slate’s William Saletan and WaPo’s Greg Sargent were even sharper, noting that Spencer and his comrades are being tarnished by the same broad brush they use to portray all Muslims as dangerous and bent on cultural dominance.

“They’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing – assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association,” Sargent writes. “What’s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it’s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.”

But Pamela Geller, Spencer’s co-founder of the group Stop Islamization of America, is having none of it.

“Are celebrities responsible for their stalkers? Were the Beatles responsible for Charles Manson? Or Jodie Foster responsible for the shooting of Ronald Reagan? Of course not,” she writes on her blog, Atlas Shrugs.

“But the sharia-compliant media is naked in their blood libel to tie this murderer to everyone of us who fight for human rights, the rule of law, the dignity of the human person, free speech, the free conscience, and equality of rights for all. Why doesn’t the media ever call out Islamic imams who really do incite to violence for their real calls to kill?”

Spencer, in a blog post titled, “Breivik stole the counterjihad movement from freedom fighters — we’re stealing it back,” writes that he feels no more responsible for the Oslo deaths than the Beatles should for inspiring Charles Manson with their song “Helter Skelter.”‘

Spencer also argues that “Islamic texts and teachings, and frequently imams, directly exhort their followers to commit acts of violence. I do not. Nor does anyone else in the counterjihad. There is nothing Breivik could conceivably have read here as a justification for killing anyone.”

What do you think, should Spencer and Geller be held responsible for inspiring Breivik with anti-Islamic rhetoric?