Former JNF UK trustee overturns Charity Commission ban in ‘landmark’ case

A former trustee of JNF UK has successfully overturned a decision by the Charity Commission to disqualify him from similar roles, in what he says could be a “landmark case in charity law”.

The Commission issued a disqualification order against Gary Mond, now chairman of the National Jewish Assembly (NJA), in 2023 over comments and actions on social media which were allegedly “anti-Muslim”.

The ruling follows Mond’s suspension, and later resignation, from his role as Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies in 2022 following what the Board called “allegations of anti-Muslim sentiment”, following the social media comments. 

Shortly after his resignation, he set up the NJA which he said intended to provide a “bottom-up” and “grassroots” alternative to the Board.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Thursday’s judgement by the First-tier Tribunal is the first case in which anyone has successfully overturned such an order.

Mond told the JC he was “pleased” by the outcome, which he claimed “says far more about the Charity Commission than it does about me”.

He questioned why the regulator thought they had the right “to police the political views of trustees and disqualify them”.

Mond continued: “At no stage has the Charity Commission said I engaged in hate speech,” questioning why the Commission had even sought his disqualification.

The NJA chair added that he thought the judgement was “humiliating” for the Commission and that “nobody likes to see major institutions in our country humiliated”.
The case was first filed in July 2023, when the Commission sought to disqualify Mond on the basis of his social media activity.

Mond’s controversial actions involved ‘liking’ posts on Facebook by Pamela Geller, an American anti-Islam activist and founder of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, also known as Stop Islamisation of America.

The two likes, which took place in 2017, were in response to the victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French Presidential election, with the posts saying sayinh: “France has chosen to go quietly into the cold, dark night. They voted for submission over freedom. France is finished”.

Mond’s other posts brought up in the hearing included comments made on Facebook in 2016, when he said: “We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilisation - west and east, American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, whatever - is at war with these evil b*******, and I have to say it, at war with Islam. And, just as Islam has lost before in history, it will lose again.”

Similarly, in 2014, following the resignation of Bethnal Green and Bow MP Rushanara Ali from the Labour frontbench over the party’s decision to back airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, Mond responded to a Facebook post which said: “British Parliament votes for air strikes in Iraq against Islamic State. Prominent Muslim Labour MP resigns in protest. Imagine a British Parliament with substantially greater numbers of Muslim MPs or 5MPs [sic] representing constituencies with Muslim voters. Britain would be hamstrung in trying to protect its essential security interests.”

Mond commented: “When this happens – and the odds are it will – the Britain that we knew will have gone forever”.

Speaking to the JC, Mond defended his decision to “like” Geller’s posts, saying: “There was nothing controversial about what I liked”.

Regarding his 2016 comments, he claimed that the post he was responding to was referencing the terror attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris the previous year.

He told the tribunal that he accepted that the part of his post that stated that civilisation was “at war with Islam” was inappropriate and open to misinterpretation.

He told the JC he accepted that: “It would have been better to say ‘political’ or ‘fundamentalist’ Islam rather than just Islam” and told the tribunal that the “evil b*******” he was referring to were the Islamist terrorists who carried out the attack.

While the term “Islamophobia” may be politically contested, Mond was adamant that he abhors anti-Muslim bigotry: “I’ve employed Muslims. They youngest person at the Seder last year was a young Muslim girl, a friend of my daughter.”

“If the language wasn’t clear then I apologise”, he said.

However, Mond defended his 2014 comments, which he called “prescient.”

“I was warning about MPs acting in sectarian interest, 10 years later we have Jeremy Corbyn’s independents being elected on the issue of Gaza”, he added.

He also told the JC that he was “very fortunate” to have the necessary funds – reportedly in the region of £60,000 – to support his appeal and questioned whether there have “been others who have been threatened and didn’t have the money” to defend their case.

The Tribunal concluded that, while Mond’s conduct “was capable of damaging public trust and confidence in charities of which he was a trustee”, it was “not sufficient in itself to establish that he is unfit to be a charity trustee or that it was desirable in the public interest for the Order to be made.”

The panel allowed Mond’s appeal and quashed the disqualification order.

A Charity Commission spokeperson told the JC: “The outcome of this case brings more clarity to trustees’ appropriate use of social media, underlining the need for all trustees to act in the best interests of their charity including while posting in a personal capacity. We note this judgment, and will learn from it.”