Did you know that the Labor party is centrist?
The AP sure thinks so.
Polls showed the five-way race being a tossup between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and political newcomer Ami Ayalon, a dovish former internal security agency head. Both have said they would work to oust the embattled Olmert, who has been discredited by his handling of last summer’s war in Lebanon.
Ayalon has pledged to lead the centrist Labor out of its year-old partnership with Olmert if the prime minister’s Kadima Party doesn’t choose a new leader. Barak says he would serve in an Olmert government, while working within parliament to topple the Israeli leader and call early elections.
They said it here, too, at the end of the article detailing the cabinet okaying a limited ground push into Gaza.
The violence comes as Israel’s Labor Party opened its leadership race Monday. The outcome could impact the stability of Olmert’s government and the embattled prime minister’s future.
The centrist party is the largest of three junior partners in the ruling coalition with Olmert’s Kadima Party. But both front-runners in Monday’s race have said they would work to topple the prime minister.
Three parties: Labor, Kadima, and Likud. If you reframe the debate by calling Labor centrist, you can push Kadima out of the center (where it was born, with members of Labor and Likud joining Ariel Sharon to create it), and to the right, and then you can begin to call Likud the “ultra-rightist” or “far-right” party—which is what will happen next. Bookmark this post and come back to it when you see it. Then send me an email, because you know I’m right.
Wikipedia calls Labor “center-left.” Then Wikipedia says this:
It is a social democratic and Zionist party, a member of the Socialist International and an observer member of the Party of European Socialists. Since 1999 the party has been allied to the small left-wing, religious zionist Meimad, in an agreement whereby Meimad gets the tenth seat on Labor’s list.
Any organization with the word “socialist” in its name is not a centrist organization. It leans left.
Mark my words. You will soon be seeing “the far-right Likud party” in AP news articles, then picked up by everyone else.
They did that when Menachem Begin was in charge and Ben Gurion ran Labor. Why should they change now.
Well, they’re not really socialist in any meaningful way any more, Meryl, but you’ve got the main point right.
Notice that from time to time anti-Israel articles refer to the Likud rather than Israel. The subtext is that the writer is pro-Israel, sure enough, just opposed to those right-wing fanatics in Likud. Likud hasn’t had power for several years, doesn’t have major representation in the Knesset, but it’s still convenient to mask one’s true sentiments about Israel by claiming that the writer loves Israel. It’s just those Likudnik nuts he opposes.
When the press says “left” and “right” they mean relative to themselves.
Since the press is almost exclusively left-wing, the only people who ever get the term applied to them are those that are so extreme that they don’t get mentioned at all. Those that agree with the press’s bias are “centrist” and those to the right (even if it’s only on one issue) are “right wing extremists.”