Opinion

Nodding to a first principle

President Obama went before assembled world leaders at the UN yesterday, and finally delivered what right-minded Americans have been waiting for — a robust defense of this nation’s commitment to freedom of speech.

Did he mean it?

Well, that’s between the president and his speechwriters, we suppose — though it took him two weeks after the outbreak of Islamist violence in the Middle East to rise to the challenge.

Certainly it’s a shame that the idea of declaring that “the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression” didn’t come to mind last week, when the White House “suggested” that YouTube find a way to pull that controversial anti-Islam video.

But yesterday the president was spot-on, proclaiming that “efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.”

And he noted, correctly, that banning the controversial video was impossible, anyway, even if the Constitution allowed it:

“At a time when anyone with a cellphone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button,” he said, “the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.”

Still, it’s pretty clear that the president’s UN speech was essentially a campaign performance — aimed less at the delegates than pitched to US voters.

But if the speech sounded at times like it might have been delivered by President George W. Bush, there were unmistakable Obama touches — particularly his refusal to even mention the word “terrorism.”

Indeed, Obama soft-pedaled any description of what actually happened in the humiliating intelligence failure that resulted in the Benghazi consulate attack — which he first ascribed to anti-video violence and now concedes “wasn’t just a mob action.”

Which is why he claimed “it will not be enough to put more guards in front of an embassy” — though, given what we know about the state of security at the Benghazi facility, that would have been a good start.

Moreover, he refused to characterize what he called “that brand of politics” that uses “hatred of America or the West or Israel as the central organizing principle.”

Because that would mean acknowledging an ideology that isn’t looking for lessons on tolerance but rather seeks to destroy those — like Israel and the United States — whom it opposes.

And that is precisely what “speak[ing] honestly about the deeper causes of the crisis” would really mean.