Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment, a history of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Alison has long worked against war and racism and was first arrested for activism against racism fifty years ago.

The below post was written in response to Mike Merryman-Lotze's piece Palestine Activism in an Anti-Racist Frame. While the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a member of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Mike Merryman-Lotze serves on its steering committee in an individual capacity, not as a representative of AFSC.  AFSC takes no position on the action of the US Camp

The U.S. must lead by example and ensure protection for all refugees.

Images of Omran Daqneesh flood my mind, the five-year-old Syrian boy who sat in shock in an ambulance, blood covering his body, after a military strike hit his home in Aleppo, Syria. Millions more like him, from Afghanistan to Sudan to Cuba to Honduras, have been made invisible by a world that has forgotten—or worse yet demonized and destroyed—their communities.

“We, who have the advantage of seeing the reality of Gaza without this baggage of dehumanizing indoctrination can take a stand for the humanity of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Rabbi Michael Davis

In April, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe gathered outside a North Dakota town called Cannon Ball to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Since then, they have been joined by hundreds from other tribes, as well as allies from across the country. If completed, the pipeline would cost $3.7 billion and cover over 1,170 miles of land. Its construction would destroy native land and the pipeline could threaten the environment and water supply of millions of people.

Here’s what we’re reading to learn more:

A look at some of the daily struggles faced by young peacemakers in one of Latin America's most violent countries.

I began working as an intern with AFSC in El Salvador at the end of 2015, the year that our country was ranked the most violent in Latin America. That year, the country witnessed a 70 percent increase in violent deaths—one of the most deadly since the height of El Salvador’s civil war in the early ’80s.

Fabio Cano Gómez, a native of El Salvador, is an intern with AFSC's El Salvador Program, working on issues of migration and urban violence. He earned his bachelor's in international relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.