The United States chose to boycott a United Nations summit on racism in Geneva, Switzerland, this week.

The official reasons were that the document submitted for approval by the conference contained a one-sided view of the Arab-Israeli conflict and that the text’s indictment of anti-religious discrimination was a threat to free speech.

The decision to boycott the conference is lamentable, and reveals that the United States is not only unwilling to engage in greater dialogue with the international community, but is also unable to defend the values it claims to be founded upon.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is politically and morally complicated. Both sides have committed great injustices and an easy political solution to the violence appears unlikely to surface in the near future. However, such declarations have been proposed by the United Nations in the past, and judging from past history, any statement even mildly critical of Israel’s policies is paradoxically denounced by the United States as one-sided. This failure to engage in dialogue on this issue halts progress in eliminating the violence.

The freedom to practice one’s religion was one of the most treasured principles upon which the United States was founded. In America, the separation of the state from religious bodies has been based on tolerance and stands in contrast to, for example, the concept of secularism of the French Revolution, where democratization went hand-in-hand with sending thousands of priests to the guillotine.

Meanwhile, oppressed worshipers from around the world have always sought refuge in the United States, from Jews fleeing Tsarist Russia to Armenian Orthodox Christians escaping martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire to recent Catholic immigrants from Vietnam who have seen their family members sentenced to labor camps for their faith.

To argue that a call to end anti-religious hatred is a restriction of free speech is nothing but an insult to the millions of immigrants who throughout history settled in the United States in pursuit of the freedom to worship, to all people who demand respect for their convictions, as well as to the framers of the nation’s Constitution who desired to create a state where religious tolerance would always be respected. The liberty to hold sacred whatever one wants is one of the most precious freedoms. To vulgarly violate this is not free speech, but dehumanization.

Finally, it is particularly odd that just a few months after everyone from Colin Powell to the retired civil rights activist in the neighborhood marveled that American society had become so tolerant that it elected a black president, he refuses to participate in an international project aimed at eliminating racism.

This suggests that the new American leader’s many televised condemnations of racism were used as a rhetorical tool rather than a genuine concern for the spread of interracial harmony.

The United States has often been reluctant to intervene in the international community when doing so involved sacrificing national interests for the common good.

However, when the values of fighting tyranny, religious tolerance, and eliminating racism are at stake, it would be inadequate for America to continue to portray itself as the defender of global freedom.