September 2022: Parliamentary Members’ Interests record the disgraceful fact that Liz Truss has accepted £10k from Gary Mond as a donation to her election campaign. Given Mond’s Islamophobic pronouncements, he ought to be persona non grata, even within Tory circles.
Gary Mond is the Treasurer of JNF UK. His comments are not borderline racist, but fully blown hate-speech: As reported in the Jewish Chronicle, Mond posted a message saying “We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilisation … is at war with these evil bastards (sic) , and I have to say it, at war with Islam.”
Truss – or at least her advisers – must have known about this yet felt no twinge of conscience when she took £10k from him – no comment needed from us.
Mond was not alone in the JNF UK for being exposed as an Islamophobe. Samuel Hayek, the JNF UK Chairman, was also revealed as sharing Mond’s position. “Our problem in the West is that we do not understand Islam. In Islam there is not a term for ‘peace.’ “
Members of the Board of Deputies called for Hayek’s resignation following his observations. Representatives of Reform, Liberal, United and Masorti communities, plus the Union of Jewish Students said they would advise their organisations to have nothing to do with JNF UK while Hayek is in post.
So, in response to severe criticisms within what were his own circles, Mond has resigned from the Board of Deputies (or was he pushed out?) and waltzed off to establish a new organisation (The National Jewish Assembly) because the Board of Deputies is too “left-leaning” in his view and the silent majority are not being heard !
How did JNF UK as an organisation react to the Chair and Treasurer being so exposed and denounced? Silence….silence so profound that the Board of Deputies passed a censure motion against the JNF UK because it had not been “explicit in condemnation” of such racist remarks.
And what of the Charity Commission? Having launched investigations into JNF UK Trustees, Hayek and Mond, back in February, we seem to have no resolution yet to their enquiries into the very top level of the charity.
But the crucial point is this: Hayek and Mond are not just “rotten apples” in an otherwise sound barrel. The JNF, from its inception in 1901 to today is a racist organisation, from top to bottom, dedicated to removing Palestinians from their land and converting Palestine into a Zionist state.
