Eugene Volokh et la défense 'libertarienne' d'Israël aux Etats-Unis

Et en Europe quel courant de pensée défend Israël? Sans parler du manque de respect envers les Juifs, comme le prouve la RTBF qui permet la glorification d'Hitler, de Dieudonné et des propos négationnistes et antisémites sur son Facebook, le tout dans l'indifférence totale...

“Since many of the Western enemies of Israel are so conspicuously un-libertarian, I think many libertarians sort of have the sense that if the Noam Chomskys of the world are against Israel, we should be for it.” Eugene Volokh

“Would it be a more libertarian world if there was a Palestine in place of Israel? That’s pretty hard to imagine.”  David Berstein

Tablet publie un article intéressant un des blogs américains les plus influents The Volokh Conspiracy (une allusion à Hillary Clinton’s line about being hounded by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”").  Fondé par Eugene Volokh, réfugié juif d'Ukraine, professeur de droit à l'UCLA: "In 1975, Volokh arrived with his parents in the United States from Ukraine. The family settled in California; five years later, Volokh was admitted to UCLA on a full scholarship after scoring 780 out of 800 on the mathematical portion of his SAT. It would have been an impressive achievement for any student, let alone any recent immigrant—but Volokh was also just 12 years old at the time. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile in which the writer dubbed Volokh a “prodigy, a genius, or, simply, staggeringly bright,” and reported his IQ at 206."

Extraits: The Volokh Conspiracy Is Out To Get You—And Everyone in America. Run by a Soviet Jewish legal scholar, the blog took on the ACA and is now hosted by the ‘Washington Post’

"[...] Founded as a solo operation in April 2002, the site is now one of the Internet’s most-read legal blogs, boasting a diverse readership of scholars and policymakers—as well as Supreme Court Justices—across the ideological spectrum. (Justice Elena Kagan has said she reads it daily.) In January, The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post, giving it an even more prominent role in the national conversation—and more power to shape the discourse surrounding issues currently being decided in the courts, from religious freedom to gay marriage.

How did a center-right blog written by libertarian-leaning professors become the most influential in American legal circles? The story begins with its founder and namesake, a Soviet Jewish refugee named Eugene Volokh. [...]

Now 46, Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA and widely acknowledged as one of the country’s preeminent experts on the First Amendment.  But it was in 2002 that he started the site that would revolutionize the law’s place in the public discourse. At the time, the conservative blogosphere was just beginning to take off, led by University of Tennessee professor Glenn Reynolds, who launched InstaPundit. Reynolds offered Volokh a guest-blogging gig there, and he was soon hooked, enamored with the ability to disseminate his views in real time to a popular audience.

“I’m a law professor and I’m a Jew, and we both like to hear ourselves talk,” Volokh said wryly. “I’ve always wanted to spread my ideas; I think that’s an important part of my job—not just to speak to a little corner of the academy, not just to speak to the professionals like judges and lawyers, but to speak to the public on public policy.”

While Volokh had published op-eds in prominent forums like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, he found the format restrictive with its word limits and reliance on the whims of editors. Blogging, on the other hand, had no such impediments. “It was something that was tailor-made for my temperament, which was to speak out about what I want, when I want, the way I wanted,” he said. “Now that I mention it this way, it sounds kind of self-indulgent. But what’s wrong with self-indulgence?” He grins. “I mean, no one else is going to indulge you, so you might as well indulge yourself!”

And so he launched his own blog, drawing on his technical acumen to build the site. He quickly invited his brother Sasha, then a graduate student at Harvard, aboard and christened it The Volokh Brothers. In the following months, the blog added several other libertarian-leaning voices and became The Volokh Conspiracy—a nod to Hillary Clinton’s line about being hounded by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

But though the blog was unabashedly of the right, its politics were—and are—not so much partisan as ideologically committed to a general philosophy of libertarianism, which emphasizes individual rights and a profound skepticism of state power. [...] But a significant influence on Volokh’s outlook—and that of several other contributors to the blog—has been the Soviet Jewish refugee experience. Having grown up in families that experienced firsthand the oppressive potential of untrammeled state power, these individuals naturally gravitated toward libertarianism, with its deep-rooted suspicion of government overreach. “Those of us who share that story share the same reason for why we became libertarian,” explained Sasha Volokh, now an associate professor at Emory Law School.

“If I had been born in the United States and I had the same kind of personality and interests that I do, I think there’s a good likelihood I would have become a liberal or even more left-wing than that,” said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University who has written about his family’s encounter with Soviet repression and anti-Semitism, and who joined the blog in 2006. “But the experience of coming from the Soviet Union made that a lot less likely, and therefore made me more open to becoming a libertarian.”  [...]

Similarly, The Volokh Conspiracy is also generally sympathetic in its outlook toward Israel, a topic that frequently divides the libertarian community. “Since many of the Western enemies of Israel are so conspicuously un-libertarian, I think many libertarians sort of have the sense that if the Noam Chomskys of the world are against Israel, we should be for it,” Volokh told me. “But at the same time, there’s also a very substantial isolationist, non-foreign-interventionist wing of the libertarian movement that says ‘Why are we involved in Israel?’” Writers at The Volokh Conspiracy who discuss Israel fall decidedly into the former camp, even as they are often critical of its policies. Somin’s George Mason colleague David Bernstein makes the libertarian case for Israel quite succinctly. “Would it be a more libertarian world if there was a Palestine in place of Israel?” Bernstein asked when we spoke. “That’s pretty hard to imagine.” [...]

But without question, the blog’s primary impact has been on the American domestic front, from disputes surrounding eminent domain to the case against the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, the Obamacare challenge exemplified how The Volokh Conspiracy has radically transformed the legal landscape. In the past, the academy often looked askance at blogging as a distraction from more serious legal writing, to the extent that some professors initially joined the Conspiracy under pseudonyms to conceal their involvement. Today, however, blogs have become the driver of the discourse. “The way law professoring used to work was that you would spend a year writing a law review article, you would workshop it among other professors, and maybe in 18 months, it would come out in a printed book that no one would ever read,” explained Blackman, the South Texas professor. “Now a case is decided and within a few minutes you can post a few hundred words on a blog, which becomes now the narrative shaper —and I think you can credit that to Eugene Volokh and the other conspirators.” [...]