Outrage over israeli policies toward Palestinians has continued to swell the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). In response, critics of BDS are spreading rhetoric that is corroding support for civil liberties, civil rights, and free expression of ideas in the United States.Controversies over U.S. policies in the Middle East are not new, but the current stance of some institutions claiming to speak for the U.S. Jewish community, combined with biased federal policies targeting anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses, raises the specter of not just blacklists and political witch hunts but de facto government censorship.During the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights created headlines with policies that provide federal civil rights protection against harassment or discrimination targeting Jewish college students. Meanwhile Muslims, Sikhs, and students from other faith traditions did not receive the same level of attention. Under the Obama administration neither the commission nor the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has rectified this situation; and the gridlocked Congress has failed to hold hearings or pass legislation that would clarify and correct biased federal policies and actions. Meanwhile, pressure to silence criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians continues to grow, spurred on by growing public opposition to the Israeli military attacks in Gaza.A recent incident casts a spotlight on the smoldering tensions that highlight the need to protect free speech: In June a gig by the musical group the Shondes was cancelled by the Washington Jewish Music Festival because they refused to sign what amounted to a loyalty oath swearing they had never supported the BDS movement. Two founding members of The Shondes, singer Louisa Rachel Solomon and violinist Elijah Oberman, in a public letter “in light of this blacklisting debacle,” responded:Solomon and Oberman have described Judaism, activism, and music as “inseparable, essential parts of our lives” and have been opposing militarism and discrimination for years. In the wake of 9/11, they wrote: “We saw Arab, Muslim, and South Asian friends demonized and attacked…. We protested, organized, and tried to figure out what solidarity was.”Civil rights, civil liberties, free speech, and academic freedom should not be adversaries. When they are in conflict, the ultimate victim is the free exchange of ideas that nurtures democracy itself.Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the silencing of dissent inside and outside the Jewish community has steadily increased. The issue of possible government censorship on campus was first raised in a public joint letter by Kenneth Stern, an expert on anti-Semitism with the American Jewish Committee, and Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. Stern and Nelson warned that the civil rights policies of the federal government could lead to censorship and the suppression of free speech on campus. Under pressure from right-wing ideologues, the American Jewish Committee retracted Stern’s signature and repudiated the letter. Stern and Nelson feared the potential outcome of biased and misguided federal policies aimed at campus clashes over Middle East policies, especially involving the BDS movement.How did these biased policies evolve? During his presidency, George W. Bush appointed numerous right-wing ideologues to federal agencies in an attempt to sidestep congressional oversight of policies and implement so-called color-blind policies while gutting affirmative action programs. The Justice Department, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights were special targets for right-wing ideological cleansing. Under Bush, these federal agencies shifted their attention from Islamophobia and focused on the issue of anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. college campuses. This happened despite the education office’s stated goal of protecting “all religious minorities—not just Jews but also Sikhs, Muslims, and others—from discrimination at federally funded secular institutions of higher learning.”The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent federal commission established by Congress during the Civil Rights movement with the mission of pursuing a bipartisan agenda to protect civil rights for everyone. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the commission—which was still following a bipartisan approach—launched a series of efforts against Islamophobia.For example, the commission convened its July 2002 meeting in Detroit, home to the largest Arab American community in the United States, to hear about post-9/11 civil rights problems faced by Arab Americans and Muslims in their respective states. In addition, state advisory committees held public forums and initiatives addressing the civil rights concerns of Arab Americans and Muslim communities in twelve states, from Alabama to Wyoming.The commission issued a press release in which it reiterated “its commitment to protecting the rights of Arab Americans and Muslims.” Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said that maintaining “a secure homeland does not justify discrimination against Arab Americans and others today, any more than World War II justified the internment of innocent Japanese Americans over a half century ago.”Sadly, for several years after Berry made this statement, the commission drifted ever further from alignment with this mission, instead adopting a lopsided approach that focused overwhelmingly on anti-Semitism. Two right-wing Republican appointees in the middle of this situation are Abigail Thernstrom, a USCCR commissioner, and Kenneth L. Marcus, who shaped policies at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and at the USCCR. Thernstrom is still a commissioner. Marcus has left government service but continues to write and organize against anti-Semitism on campuses.Three years after the 9/11 attacks, Marcus—the deputy assistant secretary for enforcement in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—announced that Title VI civil rights enforcement would be expanded to cover students at federally funded colleges “targeted for harassment based on their membership in groups that exhibit both ethnic and religious characteristics, such as Arab Muslims, Jewish Americans, and Sikhs.”In December 2004 Marcus was appointed by President Bush to be staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Before, during, and after his tenure at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the USCCR, Marcus wrote and spoke out against anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, and anti-Arab discrimination. Yet most media reports about efforts at both agencies—as well as public awareness of their activities—pointed to an apparent focus almost exclusively on Jewish students.At the USCCR Marcus launched a major investigation into anti-Semitism on campus, leading to a highly imbalanced briefing in November of 2005. Testimony was presented by representatives from the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Law and Justice, and the American Jewish Congress. Specific targets were Columbia University, San Francisco State University, and the University of California, Irvine.Several universities under investigation refused to participate in the hearings. The commission implied that the universities’ refusal letters were nonresponsive. In fact a review of the letters on file at the USCCR offices in Washington indicates that a main concern was that the colleges felt the hearings themselves were improper.Some of the one-sided testimony at the hearings was later shown to be based on false, poorly documented, or ideologically biased claims. The testimony of Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, was drawn from a book he co-authored, The UnCivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses. According to its publisher, the book “documents the alarming rise in bigotry and bullying in the academy, using a range of evidence from first-hand accounts of intimidation of students by anti-Israel professors to anti-Semitic articles in student newspapers and marginalization of pro-Israel scholars.”One reviewer, however, described part of the book as “an indictment of 1960s liberalism, academic freedom, and tenure.” And the respected newsletter Inside Higher Ed noted that various Jewish leaders said Tobin’s book “inappropriately equates all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.”Both the USCCR and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights began to base their actions on the biased hearings and the biased views that undergirded their conclusions. Ominously, the USCCR became concerned with incidents of anti-Semitism “fueled by ideologically biased campus programs that receive operating funds from the federal government under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.” The implied threat was that federal funding was at risk.The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was designed by Congress to have an equal number of Republican and Democratic commissioners, but President Bush managed to circumvent this intent by packing the commission with a mixture of right-wing Republicans and right-wing libertarians and independents.This process began at the commission when Republican appointees, commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh, re-registered as independent voters. Rechristening right-wing Republicans as “independents” allowed for the appointment of four Republicans and two “independent” right-wing ideologues on the eight-person commission. This meant the Right controlled the panel, because to approve any major official action by the USCCR requires five votes—and the “Bush Bloc” controlled six votes. A 2007 investigative report by Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe noted:Savage explains that “until Bush’s 2004 appointments, no president used re-registrations by sitting commissioners to satisfy the law that forbids presidents from appointing a fifth commissioner of the same party.” Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, saw Bush’s move as a historic first. Shane told Savage it was an “escalation” in the use of hardball politics.To his credit, Redenbaugh, Savage noted, “called Bush’s use of his switch to appoint a Republican ‘inappropriate’ and ‘wrong.’” Redenbaugh resigned in 2005 and the Senate promptly appointed Gail Heriot, a member of the conservative Federalist Society and a Republican activist who had re-registered as an independent. Though she claimed she had disagreements with the Republican Party, she declined to name one when asked.The shifting balance of power within the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights enabled the approaches championed by commissioner Abigail Thernstrom—a woman hailed as a leading intellectual by conservative and right-wing libertarian commentators—to prevail from 2004 until recently.In her book Mobilizing Resentment, progressive scholar Jean Hardisty described Thernstrom and her husband as “rightist libertarians who have focused on affirmative action as the greatest of liberalism’s mistakes.” Hardisty notes that the Thernstroms considered affirmative action “dangerous” and that their “personal mission is to promote ‘color blind’ policies as the only true reflection of the original intent of liberal racial programs.” Hardisty notes that Thernstom has served as:Thernstrom, who now lists her political affiliation as Republican, is currently the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.As a commissioner, Thernstrom repeatedly played the role of a polite ideological hammer, striking down attempts by Democratic appointees to broaden the discussion and find some sort of bipartisan compromise. In addition, according to Savage, after the Bush appointments, the commission “stopped issuing subpoenas and going on the road to hold lengthy fact-finding hearings, as it previously did about once a year.” There were “three planned hearings in the works when the conservative bloc took over” that were cancelled, Savage found.All of this partisan maneuvering has produced troubling results:This situation lasted well into President Obama’s first administration. In November 2012 the Civil Rights Commission finally held a public briefing on “Federal Civil Rights Engagement with Arab and Muslim American Communities Post 9/11.” Chairman Marty Castro noted wryly that Commissioner Michael Yaki had been advocating the briefing “for many years.”Both Thernstrom and Marcus defended their past actions when contacted for a response to the assertions made in this article. Both noted there long has been partisan activity by both Republican and Democratic Party appointees in agencies and commissions. Both said that the intent and outcome of their actions was to ensure federal protections for Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and other students targeted based on perceived ethnic characteristics.Marcus added: “Congress should act to prevent harassment of all religious minority children. Fifty years after we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is inexcusable that Congress still has not passed a civil rights statute to bar religious harassment in our schools, colleges, and universities.”In a 2010 op-ed, former commissioner Marcus urged the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to explain that nothing in its new policy requires any encroachment on constitutionally protected expression by either advocates or critics of Israel.” He added, however, that “where anti-Israel groups are engaged in deeply offensive protests” and the university can only condemn “the hate or bigotry rather than censor or punish the speaker,” then the university deserves “to get a call from the federal agency that funds them.”This orientation raises the threat of government censorship warned about by Kenneth Stern and Cary Nelson in their suppressed joint letter. This threat emerges from the adoption of the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism because its wording was a draft for debate, never meant to be adopted uncritically. Ironically, a main author of the EUMC text is Kenneth Stern, the very same person criticized for his concern over possible government censorship.While the EUMC states that merely criticizing Israel does not constitute anti-Semitism, the examples of anti-Semitism that it offers are very broad. For example, Stern and Nelson note that the examples include holding Jews collectively responsible for acts of the Israeli state, comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or denying to Jews the right of self determination (such as by claiming that Zionism is racism). In recent years the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have crafted policies based on the abandoned EUMC document.Addressing the question of censorship based on the EUMC text, Stern and Nelson wrote:The unfinished debate over the exact language in the EUMC text centered on the question of defining when anti-Zionist or anti-Israel statements step over the line into anti-Semitism.The chilling effect of the present situation is very real. In March 2014, Northeastern University in Boston suspended a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine after the group promoted BDS in a series of actions. University officials claimed the suspension was due to an alleged failure to abide by school policies, but Students for Justice in Palestine members and civil libertarians argued it was based on the content of slogans and posters seen as offensive. In an interview with NBC News, Tori Porell, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at Northeastern, said the campus administration had a double standard. She suggested it was part of a campaign of censorship and that “our free speech is suppressed.” Northeastern’s action came roughly a year after the Zionist Organization of America complained to the university president, suggesting that the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter might be spreading anti-Semitism. The Zionist Organization of America was a major player in crafting the Civil Rights commission’s policies on anti-Semitism under Marcus and Thernstrom.Reacting to the situation at Northeastern, Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney at the Massachusetts ACLU, told NBC News that “freedom of expression isn’t always nice” and “may be upsetting, but that’s the point of it. That doesn’t mean it should be unprotected.” Wunsch noted that in every case where the Department of Education has investigated Title VI complaints stemming from campus conflicts over Israel and Palestine, the determination has been that they “do not constitute civil rights violations.” Similar free speech issues have arisen at Barnard College, Rutgers University, Florida Atlantic University, the City University of New York, and other colleges. The watchdog group Palestine Solidarity Legal Support has tracked over eighty complaints of campus intimidation aimed at supporters of Palestinian rights.In his preface to a June 2014 blog post on Tikkun Daily (tikkun.org/daily), Rabbi Michael Lerner bemoaned the fact that often “in the view of the Jewish establishment” supporters of BDS and Palestinian rights are “automatically suspect of being anti-Semitic,” adding, “We believe a public debate is a more healthy way to conduct this discussion.” Public debates should include an attempt to clarify what is meant by participants when they use the terms anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.None of what we have written here should be twisted to suggest a sinister conspiracy of Jews or agents of Israel. That is the sort of bigoted nonsense that pollutes the internet. In some cases the imbalanced outcomes of the federal government’s efforts may even have been unintentional.We tell this story to show what inevitably happens when a political party—in this case the Republican Party—packs federal agencies, commissions, institutions, and the U.S. court system with uncompromising ideologues who seek to block and crush the opposition rather than to engage in the give-and-take of democratic civil society.Bigotry and discrimination against Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and others of religious faith (as well as nonbelievers) should be opposed by all of us. The appropriate roles for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in matters of discrimination based on religion and ethnicity remain unclear. Congress and the Obama administration should rectify this biased situation as soon as possible.(Please visit buildingequality.us/silencing-dissent for a timeline of the events described here and for additional resources on this topic.)