Words matter, they have consequences. But so do reality and history, which often matter even more, as President Obama might have learned during his visit to Israel. Obama's trip was high on soothing rhetoric, but also laden with heavy baggage, piled up by Obama himself in his first term in office. The president arrived in Israel, dogged by his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, when he tracked and justified the rebirth of a Jewish state to the pain inflicted on Jews by centuries of European persecution, capped by the Holocaust. This immediately saddled him with two strikes -- his failure to visit Israel while he was in the region and his erasure of several millennia of Jewish ties to the Promised Land. Obama completely overlooked a thousand-year reign of Jewish monarchs, followed after the Roman conquest by two millennia of continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land. How to undo this presidential blunder? This time, Obama was intent from the first few minutes of his arrival...(Read Full Post)