The largest university lecturers’ union in Britain, NATFHE, voted on Monday to recommend a boycott of Israeli academics and institutions that do not “publicly dissociate themselves” from “Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall”.

It is, of course, a sad spectacle to see a crowd of witless self-publicizing minor academics purporting sincerely to think that problems may be solved if we stop talking to people. Curious, also, that cheerleaders of the motion among Palestinian academics denounce Israel’s policy of “collective punishments” and yet encourage a boycott that is itself exactly a form of collective punishment.

Let us instead focus on this odd nugget of language, “exclusion wall”. Unexpectedly, it appears to be self-defeating . . .

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In an attempt to mitigate the impact of Al Gore’s new film on global warming, an organisation called the Competitive Enterprise Institute has released two new television adverts that aim to counter what it calls “global-warming alarmism”. The bland name of the Competitive Enterprise Institute conceals the fact that it is funded by, among others, Exxon, Amoco, Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. The oil industry’s strategy for dealing with global warming has long been to try to instil confusion and doubt in the public, to “teach the controversy”, as they say in another context, even when there is no controversy. On the evidence of these ads, that is still their approach. Here is the full transcript of the voiceover for one of the ads, entitled “Glaciers”:

You’ve seen those headlines about global warming. The glaciers are melting, we’re doomed. That’s what several studies supposedly found.

But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite. Greenland’s glaciers are growing, not melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner.

Did you see any big headlines about that? Why are they trying to scare us?

Global warming alarmists claim the glaciers are melting because of carbon dioxide from the fuels we use. Let’s force people to cut back, they say. But we depend on those fuels, to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives.

And as for carbon dioxide, it isn’t smog or smoke, it’s what we breathe out and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

Note how the vast global scientific consensus on human-caused warming of the earth is reduced to a conspiracy theory featuring a shadowy, anonymous “they” who are “trying to scare us”. “They” (in other words, the world’s scientists) are “alarmists”, which has the same tang of unreason as other helpful words like “extremists”. This much is par for the course in industry-funded “scepticism”.

The attempt to rebrand a gas, carbon dioxide, meanwhile, is comical. It is true, of course, that we breathe out carbon dioxide, as a waste product; what the advert doesn’t mention is that if we were to breathe in too much of it, we would die. A strange effect for a gas they call “life”. And it is true that plants breathe carbon dioxide in; but what is as well known is that there aren’t enough plants on the planet to breathe in all the extra carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

Cleverer is the line “they call it pollution”. It attacks a straw man who believes that all pollution (smog, smoke, and so on) is made up of carbon dioxide and nothing else. Of course that is false. On the other hand, most people do consider that the extra carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is a pollutant. It is an unassailable scientific fact that carbon dioxide heightens the intensity of the greenhouse effect. Running for office in 2000, even George W. Bush had pledged to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide by power plants. Once in office, though, he reneged. White House spokesman Scott McClellan explained: “CO2 should not have been included as a pollutant during the campaign. It was a mistake.” Not a scientific mistake, of course; a political one.

The rhetorical crux of the advert, however, is its claim that there are some “scientific studies” that apparently “found exactly the opposite” from the studies about melting glaciers. As a matter of fact, the CIE’s claims about the studies it cites are demonstrably false . . .

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Observer columnist Nick Cohen is confused about nomenclature. He writes:

Franco Frattini, the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, has already banned the use of the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ to describe Islamic terrorism. ‘You cannot use the term “Islamic terrorism”,’ he insisted. ‘People who commit suicide attacks or criminal activities on behalf of religion, Islamic religion or other religion, they abuse the name of this religion.’

I was brought up as a democratic socialist and abhorred the crimes committed in the name of the left. But I would always agree that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were inspired by a version of socialism, just as the most liberal American Christian would accept that fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics are inspired by a version of Christianity.

Yet the EU wishes to deny that political Islam inspires terrorists to blow up everything from mosques in Baghdad to tube trains in London, even when Islamist terrorists say explicitly that it does. You should always pay your enemies the compliment of taking them seriously. The EU can’t understand what its enemies are saying, because it won’t call them by their right name.

You may notice that the comparisons are subtly rigged. Cohen insists on saying “Islamic terrorism” all right, but he will only allow that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were “inspired” by “a version of” socialism, and abortion-clinic bombers by “a version of” Christianity. To be consistent, he should demand that Stalin be named “a socialist dictator” tout court, and the abortion-clinic bombers be named “Christian terrorists”. But he doesn’t write those phrases down.

What is odd is that Cohen, almost as if by accident - or as though he doesn’t actually know the difference - actually uses the correct term on the way to demanding the wrong one. He refers in passing to “Islamist terrorists” who claim inspiration from their religion. “Islamism” (whose adherents are “Islamists”) is the term that scholars of Muslim thought use to describe a tradition that seeks to apply (some interpretation of) the teachings of Islam rigorously to the political sphere. It contains a militant strain of violent rhetoric and action that goes back to the writings of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s. It now rightly describes the rhetoric and action of such organisations as Al Qaeda.

Cohen, on the other hand, appears to think that it matters little if he describes Islamists, alternatively, as being inspired by “political Islam”, a construction implying that when Islam gets into politics, its only issue will be murder. That there have been, and are, political Islams that abhor wanton killing is not a very obscure fact, but it is not allowed to get in the way of the incontinent generalization. And the language of “Islamic terrorism” works in a similar way . . .

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The selection of Iraq’s new prime minister and other officials is, said President Bush yesterday, a “turning point” for that country’s people.

This is not the first turning point for Iraq in recent times. In July 2003, for example, Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the US military commander in Iraq, said:

the death of Uday and Qusay, I believe, is definitely going to be a turning point for the resistance and the subversive elements that we’re encountering.

Four months later, after nearly 40 American soldiers had been killed in 10 days, Sanchez insisted that another “turning point” in the war was imminent - or, as you might say, just around the corner. After this “turning point”, Sanchez predicted, the “former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists” (no mention of disgruntled folks back then) would “fail” in the face of renewed US aggression.

That same month of November 2003, the President also declared a “turning point” in “the world democratic movement”.

But we were not yet in the home straight, for other turning points loomed. The June 2004 “transfer of sovereignty” to the interim Iraqi government (“Let freedom reign!”) was announced as yet another “turning point” for Iraq. The January 2005 elections marked the next “turning point”, Bush said, and for good measure they were also “a milestone in the advance of freedom and a crucial advance in the war on terror”. By the end of last year, the President foresaw that:

the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq.

And yet another turning point has been navigated this week. There seems to be no end to turning points. It is as though Iraq is a massive labyrinth. No sooner have you turned once than you must turn again.

In this way, any notion of success, of arrival at a destination, is pleasantly deferred, just as it is in the notions of a “road map” or freedom being “on the march”. “Turning point” is a cunning metaphor, since it does not insist that we are now in the objectively correct orientation. There may be more turning points to come, and that is fine. The phrase does not even explicitly admit that things beforehand were not optimal, that we were not going in exactly the right direction. After all, if you are journeying in a car, you are not going in the wrong direction just because you might have to make a right turn a few miles ahead. That’s just the way the roads are made . . .

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