If Senator Obama’s mission yesterday at B’nai Torah in Boca Raton was to reassure the Jewish community on foreign policy, put us down as unreassured. These columns have been defending him from “Primary Colors”-style claims by his political opponents that he is an enemy of Israel. The e-mail campaigns portraying him as a secret Muslim or using guilt-by-association to impose on him the views of those with whom he has only tangential relations are odious and do a disservice to a candidate who has strived to be a friend to Israel and to American Jewry. Indeed, on some level it was stirring to see Mr. Obama stand in Florida yesterday and pledge himself to Israel’s security while speaking movingly about the Jews who traveled on buses to help win civil rights for African Americans.

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Yet there was something disturbing — not about the candidate’s youthful background or his name or a few of his third-tier foreign policy hangers-on, but about some of the words Mr. Obama himself spoke yesterday. He spoke of Israel lying between the “West Bank and the Mediterranean,” using language he had spoken before to emphasize Israel’s vulnerability and turning it into what sounded like a pre-judgment about borders for a state that used to be between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. He spoke of wanting to withdraw from Iraq and negotiate directly with Iran, relying on, he said, Europe and the Gulf States, along with the United Nations, and claiming that for America, legitimacy would come through diplomacy. He claimed that eight years of bluster toward Iran hadn’t made American any safer.

In fact, the Bush administration has been conducting low-level negotiations with Iran, directly and through intermediaries, for years, to no avail. The Battle of Iraq, far from strengthening Iran, may have briefly caused Iran to suspend its nuclear program. No one who cares about Israel’s security would propose putting it in the hands of the Gulf States, Europe, or the United Nations, all of which are home to abiding hostility to the Jewish state. The Bush administration tried giving Europe the lead on Iran policy, and Democrats like Senator Clinton criticized it. “I don’t believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others,” Mrs. Clinton said in 2006. Now Mr. Obama wants to try this kind of failed approach all over again.

If Mr. Obama is correct that diplomacy lends legitimacy to America, diplomacy will also lend legitimacy to the regime in Iran. But true legitimacy comes not from diplomacy but from a government based on freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, which America has and Iran does not. In enumerating the things that would qualify Iran for the “carrot” of improved relations with America, Mr. Obama yesterday mentioned ending support for terrorism, recognizing Israel, and ceasing its nuclear weapons program. He made no mention of allowing freedom of the press, religion, assembly, or genuine elective democracy in Iran.

In the end these aren’t parochial issues but key foreign policy questions about Mr. Obama’s perception of America’s role in democracy promotion around the world and in protecting American national security. Iran, after all, isn’t a threat just to Israel. Senator Lieberman told the Commentary dinner Sunday night that Iran is responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. General Petraeus told the Senate yesterday that Iran’s influence in Iraq is “lethal and it is illegitimate. They are arming, training, funding and directing militia extremists that have killed our soldiers.”

We’d be happy if Mr. Obama worried a little less about the Jewish vote in Florida and a little more about the Baha’i vote. The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement this week calling attention to the fact that six Bahai leaders in Iran had been arrested May 14 and a seventh has been detained since March. “The arrests of leaders of the Bahai faith demonstrate the seriousness of the loss of basic religious freedoms and human rights in Iran,” the ADL said. The same spirit that animated Jews and blacks to work together for civil rights in the South can be found in the effort to win freedom for the people of the Middle East today. If Mr. Obama wants to cast that spirit aside in favor of negotiating with dictators and a realpolitick of allying with the Gulf States, he will be betraying not only his American Jewish supporters but people of all faiths around the world who have put their hope in America to stand for liberty.