Senators today received copies of a memorandum from Sen. Alexander Wiley, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which charged that anti-Semitism has been injected into efforts to kill the Administration’s emergency bill to admit 240,000 additional Europeans in the next two years.
“The anti-Semitism,” Sen. Wiley stated, “is particularly vile in connection with this bill, because so tiny a percentage of individuals of the Jewish faith is involved in any way at all among the potential immigrants.”
Sen. Wiley said he and 17 fellow Senators who joined with him in sponsoring the Administration bill and President Eisenhower himself have been targets of “slanderous abuse” from “a poisoned well of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.”
The Wiley memorandum said that “by final favorable action on this bill, we of the Congress will be giving the only sort of answer which that tiny, poisonous outside monority deserves – a thundering rebuke – a thundering denunciation of their vicious efforts.
“Those efforts are unworthy of the respected, substantial individuals and groups inside and outside the Congress who, for fair, valid reasons, in their own judgment, oppose the bill,” Sen. Wiley pointed out. “I know that these worthy members of the opposition would disassociate themselves completely from the slanderous attacks by the bigots, hate-filled, discrimination-screaming outside minority,” he added.
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