Vice President Dan Quayle, who has frequently pledged that the Bush administration will work to repeal the “odious” U.N. General Assembly resolution denigrating Zionism as racism, told a receptive audience at a historic synagogue here that he has no doubt it will happen.
“My friends, I promise you Resolution 3379 will be repealed,” Quayle declared Wednesday night at the Baron Hirsch Synagogue, which was celebrating its 120th anniversary.
Quayle said the resolution must be repealed because “it provides anti-Semitism with the appearance of international approval.
“Together, we will make it so,” the vice president said. “While some might consider this an ‘impossible dream,’ so, until recently, were the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
“Yet all these impossible things have come to pass,” he added.
Referring to the Jewish tradition that equates 120 years with a complete life span, Quayle wished the synagogue “another 120 years of service to your community, your nation and your creator.”
The Orthodox congregation is named after Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the German Jewish philanthropist who died in 1896.
Quayle observed that just 50 years later, “most of the Eastern European Jewish community was destroyed in the unspeakable outbreak of evil known as the Holocaust.”
The vice president described his recent trip to Eastern Europe during which he placed wreaths at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and at the monument in Budapest to Raoul Wallenberg, who is credited with having saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to death camps.
TELLS OF VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ
Quayle described how when he, his wife Marilyn and their children — Benjamin, 14, and Corinne, 12 — visited Auschwitz, they were “deeply shaken and very moved by what we saw.”
“It was particularly important to Marilyn and me that our children were along,” Quayle said. “It is vital that not only our generation, but future generations, never forget.”
The vice president stressed that evil must be fought both at home and abroad.
“Fighting evil at home means fighting those who thrive on hate and prejudice,” he said. “There is no room in America for hate crimes, for bigotry, for anti-Semitism.”
Quayle added that “we will not be silent, we will not be indifferent and we will not rest until we rid our land of these cancers of the human spirit.”
But he stressed that this effort must also be carried on internationally. “For unless the lawabiding nations of the world band together to resist the power of evil, it will grow and spread until it encompasses the whole Earth,” he said.
Quayle said that was why Operation Desert Storm was important, not just to liberate Kuwait after it was invaded by Iraq, but to set a precedent for a new world order.
(JTA correspondent David Friedman in Washington contributed to this report.)
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