The U.S. Senate recently approved a bill that was advertised as a way to help the federal government combat harassment against Jewish college students. But the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is both unnecessary and fraught with First Amendment problems. If it reaches his desk, President Barack Obama should veto it.

The legislation was proposed as a remedy for anti-Semitic acts directed at students and faculty. But the Department of Education already has the legal tools needed to punish colleges and universities that don’t deal effectively with acts of violence or intimidation motivated by racial or religious hatred, including anti-Semitism.

This legislation is really about something else entirely: Israel. It would endorse an expansive definition of anti-Semitism that was adopted by the State Department in 2010 as a benchmark for diplomats. The problem with the definition is that it unfairly conflates anti-Israel speech with anti-Semitic speech in a way that, if enforced, would violate the free speech rights of students and professors. Among other things, the examples of anti-Semitism provided by the State Department include denying Israel’s right to exist, “demonizing” it by blaming it for “all interreligious or political tensions” and judging it by a double standard “requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

But is it necessarily anti-Semitic to harshly criticize the Jewish state or even to argue that it should be replaced by something else? While there are, of course, anti-Semites among Israel’s many critics, it does not follow that all opposition to Israel is inherently anti-Semitic.

As we’ve noted before in opposing a campaign to have the University of California endorse this same definition: “It’s hard to see how these standards could be transplanted to the campus of a public university committed to a robust exchange of views and subject to the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment. Would pro-Palestinian students who mounted a protest against Israeli policies in the West Bank be judged anti-Semites because they didn’t also demonstrate against repression in Egypt or Russia? What about a student who wanted to argue that Israel should be replaced by a nonsectarian state? Even those who find such a position unrealistic or undesirable might agree that it needn’t be driven by hatred for Jews.”

Eventually UC’s regents adopted a set of “principles against intolerance” that condemned “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism” as one of several forms of discrimination that had no place at the university.

The same balanced approach should guide the federal government. It should by all means continue to enforce the existing language in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. But if the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act were to pass, it would require the Education Department to “take into consideration” the State Department definition in determining whether an action was motivated by anti-Semitic intent, and thus possibly a violation of Title VI that could lead to a loss of federal funding.

While the bill includes an assurance that it is not meant to “diminish or infringe upon” First Amendment rights, that is exactly what it does. Its definition of anti-Semitism would blur the distinction between acts of intolerance directed at individuals and criticism of the state of Israel.

Los Angeles Times