The leader of the free world urged a broader assault on the Islamic State yesterday and called for more nations to join forces to crush the enemy. In response, President Obama said he would think about it.

The upside-down quality of the meeting between Obama and French President François Hollande was painful to watch. The attacks in Paris have energized and emboldened Hollande, but Obama again oozed an air of “this too shall pass.” A week after he shamefully called the Paris slaughter a “setback,” he’s still in a fog of his own making.

He refuses to call the spreading cancer what it plainly is — Islamic terrorism. Instead, he has adopted the Arabic pejorative for the Islamic State, Daesh, perhaps believing he can insult the barbarians to death.

What he won’t do is assert American leadership when it is needed most. Without the world’s military and economic superpower leading the charge, there can be no real charge.

Thankfully, Hollande is not giving up. His Washington visit is part of a frenetic shuttle mission to assemble a coalition that he hopes will smash the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and break up its murderous networks across Europe.

He met with Great Britain’s David Cameron on Monday, will see Germany’s Angela Merkel on Wednesday, Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Thursday and then other European leaders.

The point, he said, “is so that we can act.”

At that, Obama stirred himself to take offense at the suggestion that there was no action now. He interjected to say, “We’ve got a coalition,” and insisted 65 countries are united.

His is a coalition on paper only and is having little impact on the Islamic State’s caliphate and has not stopped it from carrying out the attacks in Paris and elsewhere. Much of America and Europe are on heightened alert, and Belgium remains in a security lockdown.

It’s not that Obama doesn’t want to do anything. It’s just that he doesn’t want to do much more than he’s already doing, which is clearly inadequate.

Though he’s often wrong, he’s never in doubt, and even adopted a weary attitude of “I told you so” about Turkey shooting down a Russian jet. The incident “points to the ongoing problem with the Russian operations,” he said.

Yet oddly, he never mentioned that Turkey is a member of NATO, a significant element that raises the risk of wider war and could imperil the alliance if it does not support Turkey.

Although he was a portrait of peevish hesitancy for most of the hour, Obama did show real passion when he talked about Syrian refugees. Adopting a scolding tone, he emphasized the need to uphold America’s “ideals” and quoted from the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty.

The moment smacked of a political diversion, and was rich with irony.

Obama’s eagerness to take in refugees that the Islamic State vows to infiltrate stands in shocking contrast to the State Department’s worldwide travel alert for all Americans. “US citizens should exercise particular caution during the holiday season and at holiday festivals and events,” the alert said. “Extremists have targeted large sporting events, theaters, open markets and aviation services.”

In a nutshell, that’s Obama World. Appeasement leading to a deadly chaos around the world that requires Americans to hunker down at home, twinned with an accusation that we are frightened bigots unless we open our borders.

By the end of their exercise in role reversals, you had to feel for Hollande. And you certainly couldn’t blame him for rushing out of a country whose commander in chief makes a virtue of leading from behind.

It’s wheel anarchy

The Post report on a proposal to let bicycles run through city red lights and stop signs caught me by surprise. Having rarely seen a bike rider obey a traffic signal, I had assumed road rules were optional for them.

The proposal, by Councilman Antonio Reynoso, a Brooklyn Democrat, has all the logic we expect from the council. “Riding a bike is not like driving a vehicle. A bike’s motor is the human body, and there is the issue of losing momentum,” Reynoso said. “It is not sensible to have to stop and go at every stop sign.”

Not sensible to stop? He’s right — unless you happen to be among those silly people who insist on driving or walking. Then the biker who doesn’t stop is your problem.

The likely next step in this journey to insanity is to abolish the one-way requirement for bikes. Like running red lights and stop signs, bikers already feel they can go any which way they please, so let’s stop pretending that one-way laws matter, too.

After all, expecting people to obey the law isn’t sensible.

Sorry time to be sorry, Hill

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi didn’t get her to do it, nor did her use of a private server as secretary of state. But Hillary Clinton has finally found something she’s ready to apologize for — using the term “illegal immigrants.”

“That was a poor choice of words,” she wrote in a Facebook chat about comments she made in New Hampshire, CNN reports. “As I’ve said throughout this campaign, the people at the heart of this issue are children, parents, families, DREAMers. They have names, and hopes and dreams that deserve to be respected.”

It’s an odd thing to pander on because illegal immigrants can’t vote. At least not legally.

Kids lose with Blas status quo-tas

Say this for Mayor Bill de Blasio: He’s deadly serious about playing race games.

Two separate reports have the Department of Education setting quotas for schools. One involves the hiring of nonwhite male teachers, and the other is a set-aside for nonwhite students in a Brooklyn Heights district.

Regarding the teachers, The Wall Street Journal reports that the city will spend $16.5 million to recruit and retain 1,000 additional male teachers “of color.” Officials say black, Latino and Asian males now make up 8.3 percent of all teachers, while 43 percent of students fall into those categories.

“The city’s workforce should look like the city,” Deputy Mayor Richard Buery told the paper. What law says that?

On the student quota, The New York Times says that educrats have settled on 50-50 racial balance for a rezoning plan that would shift white students from one overcrowded school to another near housing projects that is partially empty. When parents from both groups objected to the initial plan, which had no quotas, the would-be Solomons cut the baby in half.

Naturally, nobody is happy. Just as naturally, school officials take that as proof they are right.

The mayor fancies himself a warrior for racial justice, but the reports also are noteworthy for what they don’t discuss. There is nary a word about improving schools or educational excellence.

See, in de Blasio’s dream, all the kids will fail together. That counts as progress among progressives.