On Tuesday, the voters of West Virginia passed a measure putting a ban on “medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing” into the state constitution. The first of those terms is the one favored in Canada, where the practice has become fairly widespread; the other two were used by the Nazis, euphemistically, to describe their T-4 program, where the mentally ill and those with other chronic conditions were murdered. This program preceded the systematic murder of the Jews. Amanda Achtman describes her tour of the places where it happened:

In the spring of 2022, I visited one of eight former Nazi euthanasia centers—what Simon Wiesenthal called “regular schools of murder.” . . . All but one—Brandenburg—served as psychiatric hospitals or homes for persons with disabilities before being converted to euthanasia centers by the Nazis. [One of them], Hartheim, houses an exhibit on modern eugenics alongside a memorial to the tens of thousands of people killed within its walls.

The link between Nazism and eugenics is often noted only in passing. But it was precisely this link that enabled Simon Wiesenthal to answer questions that bothered him for years. . . . “Castle Hartheim and the other euthanasia centers were the answer,” he concluded. “Hartheim was organized like a medical school—except that the ‘students’ were not taught to save human life but to destroy it as efficiently as possible,” Wiesenthal observed.

Christian Wirth, the notorious leader of Operation Reinhard—the program to exterminate Polish Jewry—got his start supervising the Reich’s euthanasia program. . . . Other SS officers followed suit.

Strong objections to the program from the Catholic Church led the Nazis to put an end to it. And they learned an important lesson: mass killings should take place in occupied Poland, out of sight and out of mind of a German population that preferred not to know what was happening.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.