Guardian ran anti-semitic debate, shock!

This is Nick Cohen's contention in an article I have now read and alluded to more times than is good for a person. Here's what he actually wrote:

The moment when bewilderment settled into a steady scorn, however, was when the Guardian ran a web debate entitled: "David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic".

Here's the Guardian's take on this:

In last week's New Statesman Nick Cohen wrote an article that stopped me and several of my colleagues in our tracks. In a piece about the rise of anti-semitism on the left he cited the unpleasant experience of "when the Guardian ran a web debate entitled: 'David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-semitic'".

Of course the impression one would get from this is that we orchestrated or commissioned such an offensive exchange. The fact is that it was a thread started not by us but by a user, which has now been deleted and which would have been deleted as soon as we had seen it, as it clearly breaches talk policy. In that sense it had nothing to do with GU or the Guardian, yet it had appeared on our website talkboards. This raises the difficult question of whether allowing users to do what they wish is damaging to our editorial brand and whether that is a strong enough reason to impose more draconian rules on our users.

In this case the writer, Emily Bell, has chosen to be far more kind to Nick Cohen, a colleague at the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer, than he chose to be to his colleagues at the Guardian.

In this case it was a simple misunderstanding and an issue of terminology.

Yeah right.