No single word in the political vocabulary has been more used and abused over the past 50 years than “McCarthyism”. Part of the unhappy legacy of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s brief but lurid career as a demagogue in the early 1950s was to leave a term which has since been so overworked as to be almost meaningless.

Along with the related “witch-hunt”, this word is an incantation recited in an attempt to deflect any awkward charge, false or true. It is not so much unusual as well-nigh unique to hear the term used in a context where it means something valid: to condemn the proposed boycott of Israeli universities and academics.