Over the past few months, I’ve frequently been troubled by the tone of President Barack Obama’s statements towards the Muslim world.  At his best, Obama has typically skirted important issues that divide the U.S. from many Muslim populations — including our divergent views on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, theocracy, and the treatment of women.  At his worst, the President has paid lip service to the conspiratorial belief – common in the Muslim world – that Americans doubt Muslims’ humanity, thereby promoting a negative image of the very people who elected him.

But after announcing Saturday that the United States would boycott this week’s United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism, Obama finally spoke with a level of moral clarity that befits the leader of the free world:

‘I would love to be involved in a useful conference that addressed continuing issues of racism and discrimination around the globe,’ Obama said in Trinidad on Sunday after attending the Summit of the Americas.

But he said the language of the UN’s draft declaration ‘raised a whole set of objectionable provisions’ and risked a reprise of the 2001 predecessor summit in Durban, ‘which became a session through which folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive.’ …

‘We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that’s not something we can sign up for,’ Obama said on Sunday. ‘Our participation would have involved putting our imprimatur on something we just didn’t believe in.’

Indeed, the argument that those who advance blatant hatred for Israel under the pretense of “combating racism” are hypocritical is an important one.

Still, I only wish that Obama would demonstrate similar clarity in defending his own country against its most vitriolic detractors.  Pathetically, the President declined to do so earlier yesterday morning, when he sat silently through Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s mindless, 50-minute diatribe against “terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America.”