This is the true context for Burg's revelations, and yes the Obama train is leaving the station--which is to say that my country will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous treatment of a minority.

One can always hope. But I see not the slightest evidence, as of yet, that this statement is actually true. Instead, it appears to me that Obama spent much effort in his primary camapign, and continuing into the general election campaign, in an entirely one-sided and over-the-top efforts to "reassure" the American Jewish community that he was no less a fanatic defender of Israel than any of the other top candidates and prominent elected politicians.

I am lead to believe, based on some of his statements and associations prior to running for President, that Obama has lodged somewhere in the back of his brain some latent sympathies for a few Palestinians and the injustices done to them. However, those intimations of insight were all submerged fairly quickly during the election campaign, and Obama seems now to have reassured and reassured and reassured all the way to mainstream ultra-Zionist respectability, and a perpetuation of US paralysis in the Near East. Certainly one can't argue that any of his appointments so far has given us reason to think he has any intentions of taking even the slightest risks in breaking out of US political orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian question.

Hillary Clinton? Rahm Emanuel? Safe, safe.

Usually I try to maintain my political realism and consequent state of grumbling, peevish melancholy where the Israel-Palestinian conflict is concerned. I try not to get temperamental and angry. But you know one thing that has increasingly pissed me off lately? What happened to Jimmy Carter. Carter is one of the most decent, honest and compassionate people we have ever had in public life, a man of whom millions of Democrats are very proud. But it appears to me that he has been effectively sidelined and blacklisted by the likes of Alan Dershowitz for daring to suggest that what look like apartheid conditions in the occupied territories might actually be apartheid conditions. It also appears to me that the Obama campaign went along with this blacklisting. And that is UTTERLY SHAMEFUL. It really makes me MAD.

Phil Weis, like our own MJ, is a real optimist. Not me, but I hope they are right. In any case, this is another article for TPM that seems to be mark a transition. When the Mearsheimer and Walt article came out, discussion of its main point was quite muted in the main articles and when referenced in the comments, elicited very strong Zionist objections. And now its main point is being casually mentioned -- namely that there is a powerful Jewish lobby that has pushed the US into positions in the ME that are not only not in America's interest but only in the interests of an expansionists Israeli state that is ultimately working against Israel's real interest as well. On the eve of the Iraq war I made a similar statement and was denounced in public as an antisemite by a formerly respected colleague. That would not happen today.

I hope you're right Phillip, but Emanuel, Lieberman, Clinton, and Biden all have outstanding pro AIPAC track records.

At the very least, distractions will be created to enable the status quo to continue. Note Lieberman, McCain, and Lindsay Graham all warning Pakistan that the US will take action if India doesn't.

Then there's this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWpWc_suPWo

[...] my country, having elected a black president, will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous and shocking treatment of a minority.

. His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly

Excuse me, but what did Germany do to Israel? Wasn't the Third Reich gone by the time Israel was created? In the meantime, the Nazis had no problem with the Zionists.

Please do not conflate "Israel" with "the Jews"
you are starting your post with a dishonesty in the first sentence.