by JNS Staff, Amelie Botbol
Rising antisemitism has made the U.K. unsafe for Jews, said attorney Robert Garson.
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| A protest against antisemitism held in Manchester, England; among those in attendance is the then-U.K. Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, Jan. 21, 2024. Credit: U.K. Home Office via Wikimedia Commons. |
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer has initiated discussion with the U.S. State Department regarding the possibility of offering asylum to Britain’s Jews, The Telegraph reported on Sunday.
The United Kingdom was “no longer a safe place for Jews,” said Robert Garson, according to the report. During an interview with the paper, Garson said he’d reached that conclusion following the slaying of two people on Oct. 2 at a synagogue in Manchester, amid the proliferation of expressions of antisemitic hatred following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Garson, himself from Manchester, said he could see “no future” for Jews in the United Kingdom. He added that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had allowed antisemitism to flourish.
Garson discussed the idea with Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, he added, in Garson’s capacity as a board member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Garson, a Trump appointee to the Council, began serving on it in May after Trump had fired some board members appointed by Joe Biden.
“The U.K. is no longer a safe place for Jews. I have spoken to the State Department as to whether the president should be offering British Jews asylum in the U.S. It is certainly not an unattractive proposition. It is a highly educated community. I have spoken to people in the State Department and I have mentioned it in my role on the Holocaust Museum board,” said Garson, who moved to the United States in 2008 after working in London as a barrister.
British Jews are a segment of the population that “speaks English natively, that is educated and doesn’t have a high proportion of criminals,” said Garson, who lives in Florida.
Last year, Trump allowed into the United States dozens of Afrikaner asylum seekers from South Africa, whom he and many others have said were being targeted by the government, or denied its protection, because of their race. Trump said Afrikaners were “victims of unjust racial discrimination” sponsored by the state, a claim disputed by the South African government and some of Trump’s critics.
Expressions of hatred
“When I look at what is going on with Jews in Britain, and when I look at the changing demographics, I don’t believe—and I have discussed this with people in the Trump administration—that there is a future for Jews in the United Kingdom. For me, that is particularly sad,” Garson told The Telegraph.
The failure of authorities to prevent expressions of hatred toward Jews on the street, including through violence, has been a significant factor in destabilizing British Jewry’s sense of security, according to Garson. The Crown Prosecution Service has failed to uphold the law in its refusal to bring charges against protesters “on the streets of Britain who had glorified in the rape or death of Jews” after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres, he continued.
There was “a lack of political will” to use the Public Order Act to crack down on anti-Israel demonstrators, said Garson, who has specialized as a criminal defense barrister in the United Kingdom. Starmer “has turned a total blind eye to antisemitism. The prime minister has allowed rampant antisemitism to become commonplace in society and has allowed it to come from those who really don’t have Britain’s best interests at heart,” he added.
Entire areas of Britain would succumb to sharia law if fundamental Islamism went unchecked, Garson warned. “Mark my words, they are coming for the Jews and then they are coming for your pubs. You are going to have sharia-compliant areas very, very soon,” he said.
“In Britain, why has the IRGC [the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran] never been banned, and why hasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood been sanctioned?” Garson asked.
Britain last year tallied the second-highest annual total of antisemitic incidents in decades, according to the Community Security Trust Jewish security group. The CST counted 3,528 incidents, “reflecting sustained levels of hatred towards Jews,” it said in its report for 2024.
Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid Party), the leader of the Israeli opposition, told JNS on Monday he was “very worried” about the global rise in antisemitism.
“We need to emphasize the fact that Israel is the homeland of every Jew on earth and is more than welcome to come here if he feels in jeopardy or suppressed in any way,” he said, speaking after a faction meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem.
“I don’t know if I would specify the United Kingdom, but it is true that all over the world Jews feel that they are being persecuted again,” Lapid added. “Therefore, we need to open our gates and do more than what this government is doing now in order to welcome them home.”
JNS Staff, Amelie Botbol
Source: https://www.jns.org/trump-lawyer-floats-asylum-for-british-jews/
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