Seeking honor is a double-edged sword – from ancient Greece to samurai Japan, thinkers have wrestled with whether it’s the way to virtue

(The Conversation) — Though they lived centuries apart, Aristotle and Tsunetomo both explored what it means to live virtuously, and the risks of wanting praise or recognition.

Desire for validation from other people can lead people toward virtue – or in the other direction. (Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock via Getty Images Plus)

Kenneth Andrew Andres Leonardo
January 9, 2026
THE CONVERSATION 

(The Conversation) — Pete Hegseth, the current defense secretary, has stressed what he calls the “warrior ethos,” while other Americans seem to have embraced a renewed interest in “warrior culture.”

Debate about these concepts actually traces back for thousands of years. Thinkers have long wrestled with what it means to be a true “warrior,” and the proper place of honor and virtue on the road to becoming one. I study the history of political thought, where these debates sometimes play out, but have engaged them in my own martial arts training, too. Beyond aimless brutality or victory, serious practitioners eventually look toward higher principles – even when the desire for glory is powerful.

Many times, “honor” and “virtue” are almost synonyms. If you acted righteously, you behaved “honorably.” If you’re moral, you’re “honorable.” In practice, chasing after honor can prompt not only the best behavior, but the worst. We all long for validation. At its best, that longing can motivate us toward virtue – but it can also lead in the opposite direction.

I am fascinated by the way two famous thinkers grapple with this paradox. They are teachers who lived centuries apart, on opposite sides of the world: Aristotle, the Greek philosopher; and Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a Japanese samurai and Buddhist priest.
The ‘prize of virtue’

In the age of Homer, the Greek poet who is thought to have composed “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” around the 8th century B.C.E., being “good” meant attaining excellence in combat and military affairs, along with wealth and social standing.

According to classics scholar Arthur W.H. Adkins, the “quiet virtues” like justice, prudence and wisdom were seen as honorable, but were not needed for a person to be considered good during this time.

Several centuries later, though, those virtues became central to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – Greek thinkers whose ideas about character continue to influence how many people, both inside and outside academia, view ethics today.

Aristotle’s understanding of virtue is reflected not only in his works, but in the deeds of his reputed student, Alexander the Great. The Macedonian king is commonly held as the best military commander in antiquity, with an empire that extended from Greece to India. The Greek author Plutarch believed that philosophy provided Alexander with the “equipment” for his campaign: virtues including courage, moderation, greatness of soul and comprehension.

In Aristotle’s view, honor and virtue seem to be “goods” that people pursue in the search for happiness. He refers to external goods, like honor and wealth; goods related to the body, like health; and goods of the soul, like virtue.




A Roman copy of a bust of Aristotle, modeled after a bronze by the Greek sculptor Lysippos, who lived in the 4th century BCE.
National Roman Museum of the Altemps Palace/Jastrow via Wikimedia Commons

Each moral virtue, such as courage and moderation, forms one’s character by maintaining good habits, Aristotle proposed.

Overall, the virtuous human being is one who consistently makes the correct choices in life – generally, avoiding too much or too little of something.

A courageous warrior, for example, acts with just the right amount of fear. True courage, Aristotle wrote, results from doing what is noble, like defending one’s city, even if it leads to a painful death. Cowards habitually flee what is painful, while someone who acts “bravely” because of excessive confidence is simply reckless. Someone who is angry or vengeful fights due to passion, not courage, according to Aristotle.

The problem is that people tend to neglect virtue in favor of other “goods,” Aristotle observed: things like riches, property, reputation and power. Yet virtue itself provides the way to acquire them. Honor, properly bestowed, is the “prize of virtue.”

Still, the impulse for honor can be overwhelming. Indeed, Aristotle called it the “greatest of the external goods.” But we should only care, he cautioned, when honor comes from people who are virtuous themselves. He even recognized two virtues – greatness of soul and ambition – that involve seeking the correct amount of honor from the right place.


Loyalty, even in the face of death


Nabeshima Mitsushige, the 17th-century lord whom Yamamoto Tsunetomo served.
Kodenji Temple Collections via Wikimedia Commons

Two thousand years later, and half a world away, the samurai warriors of Japan also famously focused on honor.

One of them was Yamamoto Tsunetomo – a servant of Nabeshima Mitsushige, a feudal lord in southern Japan. After his lord’s death in 1700, Tsunetomo became a Buddhist priest.

Tsunetomo’s counsel can be found in the “Hagakure-kikigaki,” a collection of his teachings about how a samurai ought to live. Today, this text is considered one of the most notable discourses on “bushidō,” or the way of the warrior.

Tsunetomo’s samurai oath involved the following:


I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior.

I will always be ready to serve my lord.

I will honor my parents.
I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.

The road to becoming a samurai required developing habits that would enable the warrior to fulfill these oaths. Over time, those consistent habits would develop into virtues, like compassion and courage.

To merit honor, the samurai were expected to demonstrate those virtues until their end. Tsunetomo infamously stated that “the way of the warrior is to be found in dying.” Freedom and being able to fulfill one’s duties require living as a “corpse,” he taught. A warrior who cannot detach from life and death is useless, whereas “with this mind-set, any meritorious feat is achievable.”

A courageous death was integral to meriting honor. If one’s lord died, ritual suicide was considered an honorable expression of loyalty – an extension of the general rule that samurai should follow their lord. Indeed, it was considered shameful to become a “rōnin,” a samurai dismissed without a master. Nonetheless, it was possible to make amends and return. Lord Katsushige, the previous head of the Nabeshima domain, even encouraged the experience to truly understand how to be of service.

The Japanese characters for ‘bushidō,’ the ‘way of the warrior.’
Norbert Weber-Karatelehrer via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

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The path to virtue, then, might involve a period of dishonor. The “Hagakure” suggests that fear of dishonor should not lead a samurai to mindlessly follow his lord’s instructions. In some cases, a servant could correct their master as a sign of “magnificent loyalty.” Tsunetomo referred to the example of Nakano Shōgen, who brought peace after persuading his lord, Mitsushige, to apologize for not paying proper respect to certain families within the clan.

The “Hagakure” presents honor as something essential to the way of the warrior. But fame and power should only be pursued along a path aligned with virtue – a life in accord with the samurai’s core oath.

“A [samurai] who seeks only fame and power is not a true retainer,” according to the “Hagakure.” “Then again, he who doesn’t [seek them] is not a true retainer either.”

Honor matters in the pursuit of virtue, both Aristotle and Tsunetomo conclude, especially as a first source of motivation.

But both thinkers agree that honor is not the final end. Nor is moral virtue. Ultimately, they acknowledge something even higher: divine truth.

For Aristotle and Tsunetomo, it seems, the way of the warrior turns toward philosophy rather than unrestrained power and endless war.

(Kenneth Andrew Andres Leonardo, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Government, Hamilton College. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)


The Conversation religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Conversation is solely responsible for this content.

Interview 

Coretta Scott King Publicly Opposed Vietnam War Before MLK — and Urged Him to Follow

Coretta Scott King’s vision shaped MLK’s politics and the broader freedom struggle, says historian Jeanne Theoharis.

By Jesse Hagopian ,

Truthout

January 17, 2026

Coretta Scott King addresses the "Solidarity Day" rally of the Poor People's Campaign from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 1968.Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids schools, states ban honest teaching about race and gender, and public officials invoke Martin Luther King Jr. to call for restraint and “civility,” King’s legacy is being aggressively stripped of its political substance.

Much of the scholarship and public memory of King has long privileged his work in the South, reinforcing the idea that racism was a regional aberration rather than a national system. This narrowing also obscures the intellectual and political partnership at the heart of King’s work, particularly the leadership of Coretta Scott King, whose global vision, antiwar activism, and organizing shaped both King’s politics and the broader freedom struggle.

King’s sustained campaigns in Northern cities reveal how deeply he understood racism as structural — embedded in schools, housing, policing, and liberal governance — and how challenging this structural racism required disruption, organizing, and sustained pressure, rather than moral appeals alone.

Historian and civil rights scholar Jeanne Theoharis challenges this hollowed-out version of King. In her new book, King of the North, she shows that King understood racism as a national crisis and devoted years to fighting school segregation, housing discrimination, police brutality, and liberal resistance in Northern cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. These efforts were often met with hostility from white liberals who supported civil rights in theory while resisting it in practice.

As the author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and A More Beautiful and Terrible History and more, Theoharis is a leading historian of the civil rights movement whose work has reshaped how we understand Black freedom struggles, state repression, and the politics of historical memory. Her latest book offers one of the most rigorous and timely accounts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Northern activism — and what it reveals about structural racism, liberal resistance, and the work required to confront injustice today. In the interview that follows, Theoharis discusses King not only as a gifted orator, but as an organizer committed to disrupting unjust systems. She also speaks about King’s sustained organizing with gangs in Chicago; the central leadership of Coretta Scott King; and why confronting the “silence of our friends” remains essential for movements resisting repression today.

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Jesse Hagopian: We’re living through very dangerous times: imperialist wars, ICE agents raiding schools, books and curricula about Black history and LGBTQ+ lives being banned, and right-wing politicians criminalizing honest teaching about structural racism. Many of the same politicians driving this wave of repression cynically quote Dr. King’s words about judging people by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin” — weaponizing his legacy to shut down conversations about racial justice. Given that context, how do you think Dr. King would respond to this current wave of rising authoritarianism, censorship, ICE raids, and repression — and to the movement erupting against it with student walkouts and mass protests?

Jeanne Theoharis: One of the most common misuses of King — both on the MLK Day holiday and throughout the year — comes from people we might call moderates (drawing on King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) who agree with the goals but not the tactics, who prefer order to justice. We see that today in arguments about protesting the “right” way.

King is often invoked to tell young people to quiet down, to stop being disruptive. But looking at King’s actual life shows his deep belief in disruption — because injustice is comfortable.

Injustice isn’t maintained only by violent actors, whether the Klan or ICE agents today, but also by people who benefit from systems of segregation, discrimination, and criminalization.

Even the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a disruptive consumer boycott meant to disrupt the city. King’s nonviolence wasn’t sanitized sit-ins — it included rent strikes, tenant organizing, school boycotts, and forcing injustice into public view.

So yes, I think King would support disruption of the status quo and cheer students walking out to protest repression.

In your new book, King of the North, you show that Dr. King saw racism as a national crisis, not just a southern one. You challenge the familiar story of the civil rights movement as one where heroic southern activists were ultimately aided by enlightened northern liberals. How does looking at King’s work outside the South complicate that narrative — and what does it reveal about who actually stood in the way of racial justice?

When we look at Dr. King outside of the South, we’re forced to see a variety of people who stood in the way of the civil rights movement.

The easy tale we often tell on King Day and in textbooks is that Dr. King and courageous southerners built this movement and, with the help of northern liberals and journalists, ultimately succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And that’s huge.

But that story is comfortable because it centers northern liberal “good guys.” What King of the North forces us to see is that many of those liberals, as King would put it, were not so liberal at home. They might condemn segregation in the South while allowing — or even defending — it in New York, D.C., Chicago, or Seattle.

Looking at King outside the South reminds us how injustice is maintained and shielded. We can think about his phrase “the silence of our friends,” and his insistence that if so-called allies object to tactics rather than injustice itself, they were never truly allies.

You write that despite the avalanche of King biographies, many fail to connect the dots on his work in the North. What do you see as the most significant new contribution your book makes to our understanding of King?

I began this research nearly two decades ago while working on the civil rights movement in Los Angeles before Watts. I kept finding King in LA talking about police brutality, school segregation, and housing discrimination — and I realized this wasn’t the story we’re usually told.

We’re often told King “discovers” northern racism after the Watts rebellion of 1965, but that’s simply untrue.

I think of the book like a kaleidoscope: You turn it slightly and the entire picture changes. The book begins with Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott both going to school outside the South.

King’s own experiences with segregation in the North — and the way supposed allies retreated when injustice was close to home — shaped everything.

In 1950, while King was at Crozer Seminary, he and friends were refused service at a New Jersey bar despite a new anti-discrimination law. When they considered legal action, white law students who had been served refused to testify because it might hurt their futures.

Meanwhile, Coretta Scott was at Antioch College, one of the most liberal campuses in the country. When the town of Yellow Springs refused to allow Black student teachers, Antioch sided with the town. Her classmates — who protested many issues — would not stand with her.

Both of them learned early that northern segregation was real, and that allies often disappeared when confronting it.

King never “discovers” northern racism later. That’s why, in his first book on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he insists that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere — and that northerners must confront injustice where they live.

The second thing the book shows is how King understood leadership — not just leading from the front, but showing up for other people’s struggles. Between 1958 and 1965, he traveled 6 million miles supporting local campaigns against police brutality, school segregation, and urban renewal.

And the third major contribution I make in the book is about Coretta Scott King.

Yes! Your portrait of Coretta is incredibly moving. Can you talk about how King of the North repositions her — not just as King’s partner, but as a leader in her own right, someone who deeply shaped King’s worldview, and also carried their shared vision forward after his assassination?

Thanks for putting it that way, because I think Coretta Scott King is often remembered as only King’s helpmate. Some books portray her as an activist before she met Martin, then as sidelined during their marriage, and only emerging with her own voice after his assassination. That narrative is deeply misleading.

She was more politically engaged than Martin when they met. She had already met Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson. She had organized with the Progressive Party and attended its 1948 convention, which challenged segregation, economic injustice, and Cold War militarism — the “triple evils” we associate with King’s final year.

On their first date, they talked about racism and capitalism. Like any good first date, right? He’s smitten. He’s never met a woman like her. At the end of their first date, he tells her, You have everything I want in a wife — you’re beautiful, you’re principled, you’re brilliant. And she responds, You don’t even know me.

Looking closely at their early courtship shows that he has to bring his A-game with her. Some of the lines he’s used to relying on simply don’t work — she shuts them down, calling them “intellectual jive.”

There’s a beautiful passage at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved about having a “friend of your mind,” and I think that’s what they find in each other: a shared political commitment, but also a shared religious and moral grounding.

Coretta was deeply Christian, but critical of church hypocrisy. King respected that. She was not a passive figure; she shaped his theology and politics as much as figures like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman.

When they get married, in 1953 — not 1973, not 1993 — she did not wear white. She did not wear a long dress. And she gets her very imposing father-in-law to take “obey” out of their vows, because it makes her feel like an “indentured servant,” — and those are her words.

This was the partner King wanted.

Her global vision shaped the movement. She joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, organized against nuclear weapons, and traveled internationally for peace work.

After King won the Nobel Prize, she saw it as a global responsibility. She pushed him to oppose the Vietnam War — and she went public against the war before he did, at great personal risk.

From 1965 on, she is publicly opposed to the war in Vietnam. That places her in a very small minority at the time — something we often forget because of how large the antiwar movement becomes by the late 1960s and early 1970s. To oppose the war in 1965 meant being labeled un-American and subjected to FBI surveillance.

In many ways, she is one of the early leaders of the antiwar movement. She speaks at one of the first major rallies at Madison Square Garden in June 1965 — the only woman on the program — and later that year speaks again in Washington, D.C. When a reporter asks Martin whether he educated her on Vietnam, he responds, “She educated me.”

She later reflects on how Martin’s star burned so brightly that her work was often overlooked or attributed to him. But those who knew her described her as “beyond steel” in her ability to withstand both the political pressure and the personal costs of taking such a public stand.

Another thing you document is King’s sustained organizing with gangs in Chicago — work he was doing before Fred Hampton’s efforts to unite gangs — which may surprise many readers because it runs so counter to the sanitized, respectability-focused version of King we’re often taught. What drew King into that work, and what did he see in those young men that others — including city leaders and the media — refused to see?

The very first night when they moved to Chicago, six members of the Vice Lords come by because the Kings are living in Vice Lords territory. At first, it’s exactly what you might expect — you’re on our turf.

But they keep coming back. Lawrence Johnson, the head of the Vice Lords, later says that you couldn’t help but fall in love with King. They talked, they argued, they spent hours together strategizing and thinking. King saw these young men as key community resources and as potential leaders.

That really gives us a different way of understanding King, who is so often reduced to a kind of respectability-politics finger-wagger. Looking at these interactions — and at the fact that he was working not only with the Vice Lords but with gangs across the city, including the Blackstone Rangers on the South Side — we see a King who listened. He didn’t interrupt.

He was trying to reduce violence between gangs, but he was also helping redirect their energy toward confronting educational inequality, urban renewal, and the slum housing conditions affecting their families. This is happening before Fred Hampton’s efforts to unite gangs — to stop them from killing each other and to turn their collective power against white supremacy.

Hampton himself credits King as part of how he arrives at that approach. Just out of high school, Hampton joins the open-housing marches that summer. The multiracial, race- and class-based gang organizing that we associate with him begins earlier.

As gangs become more political, police repression intensifies. In Chicago in the late 1960s, gang violence goes down, but police repression goes up. The kind of chilling effect we associate with Fred Hampton’s assassination can already be seen in how the Chicago Police and the FBI respond to the politicization of gangs — particularly as they forge truces and begin organizing collectively. That political turn is seen as far more threatening.

In King of the North, you challenge the common myth that segregation was only a southern problem, asking, “What if the 1964 Civil Rights Act had actually been enforced against northern school districts?” You show how King’s activism in Chicago and other northern cities — especially around school and housing segregation — was met with fierce resistance and often dismissed or downplayed by the media. Can you talk about how segregation was maintained in the North, and what kind of resistance King faced when he confronted it?

By the mid-1960s, Chicago was one-third Black. The city responded by deepening segregation. Black residents were compressed into overcrowded neighborhoods, and schools followed suit.

Chicago used “double-session days,” cutting school days in half for tens of thousands of Black students rather than integrating schools. When that wasn’t enough, the district spent millions on trailers — “Willis Wagons” — to avoid desegregation.

These schools were overcrowded, under-resourced, and deteriorating.

In October 1965, the assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Francis Keppel, decided to withhold $32 million in federal funds from Chicago Public Schools because the district was in probable noncompliance with the Civil Rights Act. White Chicago erupted. Members of Congress who had voted for the Act insisted, This is not what we meant.

Mayor Daley was furious. He boarded a plane to New York, where President Johnson was meeting with the Pope, and confronted him directly. Less than a week later, Johnson ordered HEW to reverse course and release the funds. In effect, the president of the United States halted the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act against Chicago’s schools.

I don’t usually like counterfactuals, but had the federal government held the line and forced Chicago to comply, it’s possible that cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. — places that still experience deep segregation today — might have been compelled to follow as well.

Much of your work has focused on the politics of memory — how we remember Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement more broadly. What did you learn from researching this book and what do you hope people take from King’s legacy — not just King as an orator, but as an organizer?

King connected with people across the country around police brutality. He had experienced police brutality himself, and he spoke with Chicago gang members and with people in Harlem about it. He understood police violence not as isolated incidents, but as a structural problem.

By the mid-1960s, King was describing cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago through the lens of domestic colonialism, arguing that police and courts functioned as enforcers to keep Black communities in line. That language matters. When we see that King, we see someone who speaks directly to our moment — someone who clearly understood forces that are still with us today.

For many years, like a lot of scholars and organizers, I’ve talked about the misuses of King and the misuses of the holiday. But this research also showed me how much there was still to learn about him. Even as we’ve challenged some myths, others have remained — especially the tendency to southernize him, to see him only at the front of marches rather than supporting movements, listening, and being changed by the people around him. It also reshaped how I understand who King recognized as leaders, and the diversity of people he saw as central to the struggle.

King consistently focused on structure. One of my favorite moments is when a well-meaning liberal white woman suggests that Black people should just clean up their neighborhoods. King responds, that’s the job of sanitation. No amount of individual effort, he insists, can substitute for equitable public infrastructure.

Finally, King was clear that the deliberate manipulation of history is central to the maintenance of injustice. That brings us back to where we began — today’s attempts to ban certain histories or restrict what can be taught. King understood that telling some histories while erasing others has long been a way injustice sustains itself.

Telling an honest history, then, helps us not only better see the past, but also where we are — and where we need to go.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jesse Hagopian

Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of the book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. You can follow him at IAmAnEducator.com, Instagram, Bluesky or Substack.

After ceasefire, travel restrictions still haunt Palestinians

 Opinion

After ceasefire, travel restrictions still haunt Palestinians

(RNS) — The time has come to end arbitrary Israeli travel restrictions and the overused excuse of security to allow for the most basic Palestinian human rights.

The Rev. Dr. Imad Haddad, Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, right, with his mother, from left, daughters and wife at his installation ceremony, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, in Jerusalem. (Photo by Michael Younan)

Daoud Kuttab

January 16, 2026

(RNS) — Restricting the movement of people and goods has been a consistent, troubling violation of Palestinians’ human rights under Israeli occupation. While these restrictions have escalated in a big way since Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, many expected they would loosen up now that a ceasefire has been declared. We are now on the eve of the second phase of the ceasefire, to begin with the reopening of the Rafah crossing point between Gaza and Egypt.

A lack of enough Israeli staff at the King Hussein Bridge between the West Bank and Jordan has resulted in more suffering. I have crossed the bridge in the West Bank monthly for the past 27 years. This year, Palestinians returning from spending their winter holidays with loved ones in Jordan had to set up tents as they waited for their turn to return. The bridge crossing is supposed to be open 24 hours a day, at the initiative of the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, but has not been restored to that schedule. Bridge crossings to Jordan are closed on Saturdays, although the Israeli airports continue to operate 24 hours daily without any restrictions on Friday afternoons and Saturdays, when religious Jews observe Shabbat.

And for the people of Jerusalem, there are few signs of change. Israeli checkpoints continue to have long lines, especially for travelers from Ramallah and Bethlehem to Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said publicly that Israel gives priority to supporting and easing the lives of Christians. That has been debunked by several experts, and the weekend of Jan. 9 to 11 saw further evidence of the false promises made by the Israeli prime minister to U.S. television audiences.

This past weekend, the new bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land was inaugurated in the Old City of Jerusalem, but the event was marred by the absence of many Palestinian Christian parishioners — especially from the Bethlehem area, where the Lutheran church has numerous congregations — amid travel challenges.

The new bishop, Imad Musa Haddad, himself a resident of Bethlehem, was given a six-month temporary permit to travel to Jerusalem. While the permit has no time limit, it states that he is not allowed to stay overnight in the Holy City, where traditionally, Lutheran bishops have enjoyed housing at the church headquarters, meters away from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

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The mother of the bishop almost missed the happy event, as she had been denied a travel permit due to unknown security reasons. She finally received a short-term permit that stated she was allowed to spend the needed hours at the inauguration, despite an alleged security restriction on her. We don’t know what these security reasons were, but some speculated she might have previously received a permit and failed to register her return in time, which is seen in Israel as a major security violation. 

The inauguration took place with many foreign church leaders who were ushered into the church by the two Lutheran-based scout bands in the Bethlehem area. However, the director of the band, Elias Gharib, from Beit Sahour in the West Bank, was not provided a travel permit, also due to unknown security reasons. Twelve members of the Talitha Kumi School scouts also were denied travel permits. 

At the same time, Christian schools in Jerusalem have gone on strike, objecting to the Israeli authorities’ refusal to grant their teachers from the Bethlehem and Ramallah areas permission to travel to their schools. A statement from the Christian Educational Institutions in Jerusalem said 171 teachers and administrative staff lacked sufficient travel permits, with some given permits for certain days that exclude Saturday — a school day for Christian schools in Jerusalem. And local teachers say that Israel wants to force Christian schools to work on Sundays — a business day for Jewish Israelis — despite a tradition that goes back decades, if not centuries.

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The ability of people and goods to move is a basic right guaranteed in the United Nations’ Universal Human Rights Charter and by the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with the actions of military powers in the case of a prolonged military occupation. But movement to and from Jerusalem is further compounded by Israel’s unilateral 1967 decision to annex East Jerusalem. Almost all the world powers and UN member states have refused to recognize the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, which they still consider Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

While Palestinians are striving for freedom from occupation and the ability to determine their own future in their own state, the very minimum they need today is to be treated with respect and dignity. Denying Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, the ability to travel without restriction to the Holy City of Jerusalem and other locations is not only a violation of a basic right, but a show of lack of respect and dignity. The time has come to end arbitrary Israeli travel restrictions and the overused excuse of security to allow for the most basic Palestinian human rights.

(Daoud Kuttab is the publisher of Milhilard.org, a news site focused on Christians in Palestine, Israel and Jordan. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Battle Over Facial Recognition in New Orleans Will Shape Future of Surveillance


Edith Romero, an organizer in New Orleans, discusses the dangers of the growing surveillance state.
By Ed Vogel , TruthoutPublishedJanuary 17, 2026

The New Orleans City Council and New Orleans Police Department continue to push for facial recognition technology, despite persistent community opposition.  John Lund via Getty Images

While New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago have all received significant attention when it comes to police use of surveillance technologies, the small city of New Orleans has for years been the laboratory for a sophisticated surveillance apparatus deployed by the city’s police department and other policing bodies.

Just last year, New Orleans was in the news as the city considered setting a new surveillance precedent in the United States. First, a privately run camera network, Project N.O.L.A., was exposed for deploying facial recognition technology, including “live use” (meaning Project N.O.L.A. was identifying people in real time as they walked through the city). All of this was done in close collaboration with the local police, despite these uses violating a 2022 ordinance that placed narrow limits on the use of facial recognition.

Then the city flirted with formally approving the use of live facial recognition technology, which would have been a first in the United States. If enacted, live facial recognition technology would allow police to identify individuals as they move about New Orleans in real time. All of this occurred in the months before the Trump administration deployed Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wielding an array of surveillance technologies, to terrorize and kidnap New Orleans residents. Of course, New Orleans residents have organized and actively fought back against the police and their spying, offering lessons for organizers across the country.

Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance (EOS), spoke with Truthout about the history of Eye on Surveillance, Project NOLA, the use of facial recognition technology in New Orleans and why we should all be watching what’s happening there if we’re concerned about the growing surveillance state.

Ed Vogel: Who is Eye on Surveillance and what do you do?

Edith Romero: In 2020, the Eye on Surveillance (EOS) coalition campaigned for and passed a surveillance ordinance ban that prohibited cell site simulators, facial recognition, and other surveillance technologies. Unfortunately, this ordinance was amended a couple of years later to approve loopholes for the use of facial recognition technology. EOS continues working to halt the expansion of surveillance locally, to change narratives regarding surveillance, and to build a New Orleans that is truly safe for everyone. At this moment while we face the occupation of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), ICE, and National Guard troops, we are even more committed and engaged in the fight against surveillance, with the clear understanding that surveillance is being deployed to kidnap and terrorize our communities of color.


New Orleans Resists ICE Invasion Despite Surveillance and State Repression
Before ICE descended on New Orleans, GOP lawmakers made it a crime to interfere with immigration enforcement. By Mike Ludwig , Truthout/TheAppeal  December 9, 2025

EOS has done some amazing organizing to make the problem of surveillance legible in New Orleans and across the country. Can you share more about your organizing strategy to challenge surveillance systems and infrastructure?

Our organizing strategy has always been community and coalition building. Surveillance affects us all, especially our communities of color. That is why we work with immigrants, Black and Brown residents of New Orleans, teacher unions, civic organizations, and local organizations to unite under the same mission: building a New Orleans free of surveillance. Surveillance truly impacts all of us, in every aspect of our lives; we bring forward the interconnectedness of shared struggles via our fight against surveillance through community meetings, teach-ins both in person and virtual, online educational campaigns and creative community events such as community scouting of local surveillance cameras. Relationship building is key for nurturing movements and narrative change towards a world that truly takes care of all of us. Relationship building has not only enabled the victory of getting the live facial recognition surveillance ordinance withdrawn but has strengthened community power and narrative change regarding surveillance and the root causes of safety, resources, and community care.

How have you leveraged your base building towards policy change?

Base building is essential for policy change. We know surveillance is an issue that transcends time, lived experience, and identities. To build a wide coalition that truly represented the broad harm, danger, and systemic inequities that surveillance upholds, we brought together organizations whose work doesn’t necessarily focus on surveillance, but was a reflection of how surveillance permeates almost every aspect of our lives. We worked with formerly incarcerated community leaders who teach about the dangers of surveillance for those on parole, especially in emergency situations, we brought in immigrant community members whose lives are constantly monitored and whose families are separated by ICE/CBP with the aid of surveillance weapons, we talked with teachers who provided insight into the school-to-prison pipeline and how surveillance of our youth is seeping into our education system. Base building enables a holistic perspective regarding the harm and racism that surveillance embodies, countering narratives that erroneously attribute safety to overpolicing and surveillance. The goal is to truly have conversations and demand policy that resources communities rather than corporate interests that sacrifice our wellbeing.

From the outside, it feels like the use of facial recognition technology in New Orleans is a perpetual issue. Can you trace for us what has changed regarding facial recognition technology since the policy victory in 2021?

After our victory with the surveillance ban in 2021, which banned four different surveillance technologies including facial recognition, we had to mobilize continuously against the City Council and NOPD as they continued to push for the approval of facial recognition against persistent community opposition. In 2022, City Council added amendments to the surveillance ban that approved facial recognition for “violent offenses,” opening the door to the use of facial recognition by NOPD. Fast forward to 2025, City Council and NOPD again introduced an ordinance to expand facial recognition and other surveillance technologies even further, with the goal of approving live facial recognition in all the city cameras. NOPD and City Council try to sell surveillance as the ultimate solution for crime and safety, even though research and lessons from history show that safety comes from resourcing community, not surveillance or overpolicing. New Orleans heavily invests in surveillance; for example, the French Quarter is the most surveilled area of all the city, and even so, we still have tragedies like the New Year’s Day attack last year. Surveillance will never bring safety, and as of late we have seen how surveillance is being weaponized through drones, facial recognition apps, and license plate readers to kidnap our communities of color through the violent CBP operation in New Orleans, Catahoula Crunch.

How did you learn that NOPD was using facial recognition in real time?

For a while, we had knowledge about Project NOLA secretly spying on us with banned facial recognition cameras. However, we weren’t aware of the extremely close relationship between Project NOLA and NOPD. In early 2025, The Washington Post reported that NOPD was using Project NOLA to bypass the surveillance ban on facial recognition. Through this reporting we learned that despite the ban, Project NOLA would send alerts and work intimately with NOPD officers, sending live facial recognition alerts to their phones, providing feeds of their cameras to certain officers, or communicating about certain people of interest that they wanted to be tracked through live facial recognition.

Can you contextualize the use of facial recognition in New Orleans and describe the specific communities who are targeted by the police?

Facial recognition in New Orleans has to be considered in the context of the deep history of Black enslavement, Jim Crow, and racism in Louisiana, as well as the fact that Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world. As we know, facial recognition is a deeply biased technology, one that reinforces the systemic racism that exists in our modern-day society. Research finds that facial recognition misidentifies people of color, leading to arrests of people like Randal Reid, a man from Atlanta, who was arrested by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office for crimes in Louisiana that he did not commit. Surveillance historically has been used as an excuse to overpolice and criminalize people of color, starting from the lantern laws that were put in place to surveil enslaved Africans when they moved at night through the carrying of lanterns, to the CIA operations that targeted prominent Black civil rights leaders, to the Patriot Act that demonized Muslim and Arab community members to institute surveillance of U.S. citizens and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

New Orleans is a majority Black city (55 percent, according to the 2024 census) with a sizable Latine and immigrant community, a city that is constantly being labeled as a sacrifice zone for climate crisis induced hurricanes or cancer-causing factories. It is appalling for New Orleans to constantly be used as a testing ground for racist surveillance, considering the amount of harm this technology would bring to an under-resourced city that depends on hospitality revenue from a Black and Latine labor force.

The NOPD says that they are no longer using real time facial recognition technology but there is an effort to enshrine its use into law. Tell us about the proposed ordinance and how EOS is challenging it?

Ordinance 35,137, introduced in May 2025, was a joint attempt by NOPD and City Council to approve live facial recognition in New Orleans, right after their possibly illegal partnership with Project NOLA was exposed by The Washington Post on a national level. EOS quickly mobilized against this dangerous ordinance, bringing together multiple diverse local organizations to oppose it. This included Step Up Louisiana, Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and immigrant rights organizations. National organizations such as MediaJustice, Fight for the Future, and Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure (SASSI) also joined the fight against live facial recognition in New Orleans, echoing the understanding that an assault on New Orleans’ through racist surveillance tech is an assault on our collective safety, dignity, and privacy. Surveillance is a danger to everyone, and a coalition of organizations that have diverse perspectives and communities is best situated to denounce the imminent harm posed by live facial recognition. Through public community events, meetings with council members, and campaigns to inform local communities of the danger posed by facial recognition and surveillance, EOS was able to shift public narratives, build diverse coalitions against surveillance and ultimately, get City Council to withdraw the live facial recognition ordinance.

Who is Project NOLA, the organization facilitating this vast camera apparatus?

Project NOLA is a spy network of thousands of private cameras in New Orleans as well as other cities across the country, that uses banned live facial recognition technology through their status as a non-profit. Project NOLA is owned and managed by Bryan Lagarde, an ex-NOPD officer who also hosts Project NOLA footage in reality TV crime shows. He pays himself $220,000 a year for this work and his family populates the executive board of Project NOLA. Project NOLA cameras are installed in business, houses, and private properties throughout Louisiana and even other cities such as Midfield and Fairfield, Alabama. Project NOLA’s purpose is to bypass city law and, through loopholes, facilitate law enforcement with the use of dangerous, racist live facial recognition alongside other highly invasive surveillance technology including license plate readers. Project NOLA has sole discretion and zero community accountability regarding what, how, and where their invasive video footage is stored, disposed, used, or even shared. We know Project NOLA is sharing their video streams with the Louisiana State Police, FBI, and select NOPD officers. If Project NOLA decides to, they could easily share these camera streams with facial recognition with ICE or CBP, facilitating the kidnapping and racial profiling of people of color.

How do the police, elected officials, Project NOLA, and others in New Orleans align and shape the narrative to justify the use of facial recognition and other surveillance tools?

Police, elected officials, Project NOLA, and people who have financial interests that benefit from surveillance justify and sell facial recognition as the ultimate solution for community safety. According to these people in positions of power, more cameras mean less crimes. It also means more incarceration, more profit for private prisons and detention centers, and a lazy, degrading direction to take when trying to ignore the extreme lack of resources in our communities. Real community safety doesn’t take shortcuts, it doesn’t incarcerate, and it surely doesn’t come from surveillance.

Louisiana recently passed Act 399. Can you tell us more about what this legislation does and how it compounds the potential harms of surveillance tools like facial recognition in New Orleans?

Act 399 is a state law designed by right-wing state legislators with the purpose of scaring, intimidating, and silencing any type of action that can seem to be against immigration enforcement in the state of Louisiana. As of December 26, 2025, no one has been prosecuted by this state law, but it has a chilling effect on the people of Louisiana, promoting fear of incarceration for providing mutual aid, recording ICE, or in any way supporting our immigrant communities. ICE, CBP, and our right-wing Gov. Jeff Landry could use Act 399 to force Project NOLA to share their cameras, video streams, and racist surveillance technology with and for violent “immigration enforcement” attacks.

Why do you think people from around the country should be paying attention to this fight in New Orleans?

The fight in New Orleans is one that every city will eventually face. New Orleans is the laboratory for mass surveillance experiments that eventually may spread to the rest of the country. If live facial recognition would have been approved in New Orleans in 2025, it would have provided a blueprint and example for the rest of the country to follow. Surveillance affects us all, whether in one corner of the country or another, or in Palestine where these surveillance technologies were first tested on Palestinians, because it creates a ripple effect of mass surveillance expansion that decimates privacy and constitutional rights, and perpetuates the long history of systemic racism and criminalization of poor people and people of color. At this conjuncture, when the U.S. federal government is increasingly attacking free speech and kidnapping people of color through racial profiling, the threat and danger of surveillance is even more palpable as is the need to fight it and build a better future for our communities.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Ed Vogel is a researcher and organizer.

 Trump boosts post casting NATO as a 'threat' in social media spree

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a press conference, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio react to a Sky News reporter's question about NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte calling President Trump 'daddy', at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

David Badash

January 20, 2026 

ALTERNET

While facing opposition from European leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Donald Trump took time out late Tuesday morning to go on a social media spree, including promoting a post that labeled NATO and the United Nations as threats while declaring that the “enemy is within.”

Trump’s controversial Board of Peace is “falling apart,” according to Bloomberg News UK Political Editor Alex Wickham, who reported that “The UK is not joining the board as things stand,” and that its spokesperson said the UK’s commitment to the UN is “unwavering.

French President Emmanuel Macron has also announced that he would not join the Board of Peace, which requires at least a $1 billion donation for a country to have permanent membership — which can be rescinded by Donald Trump, who is the organization’s chairman.

“So at what point are we going to realize the enemy is within,” the post Trump promoted began. “China and Russia are the boogeymen when the real threat is the U.N., NATO and this ‘religion.’ I put ‘religion’ in quotes because it’s not a religion, it’s a cult!”

Former Obama and Biden official Jesse Lee responded, writing: “So is Trump threatening to invade Greenland to counter Russia and China as he has ludicrously claimed, or is this just the beginning of his war against Europe as it seems on its face?”

Trump, or someone with access to his Truth Social account, posted dozens of posts in approximately 90 minutes.

His last post so far, at 11:47 AM ET, read: “No single person, or President, has done more for NATO than President Donald J. Trump. If I didn’t come along, there would be no NATO right now!!! It would have been in the ash heap of History. Sad, but TRUE!!! President DJT”

'Code red': Newsom tells Europe they’ve been played by Trump

California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks after he and other lawmakers signed the "Election Rigging Response Act" in Sacramento, California, U.S. August 21, 2025. REUTERS/Fred Greaves

David Badash

January 20, 2026

ALTERNET

California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom issued what he described as a “code red” warning over President Donald Trump, citing what he characterized as a “wrecking ball” approach to the global order.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Governor Newsom told reporters that Europeans have been “played,” and that Trump has been “playing folks for fools.”

Calling the entire situation “embarrassing,” Newsom rejected the idea that what is happening between Trump and world leaders is diplomacy.

“This is diplomacy with Donald Trump? He’s a T-rex,” Newsom said, describing the president as a vicious dinosaur. “You mate with him, or he devours you. One of the other.”

Newsom warned that Europe is still playing by the old set of rules, while arguing that in actuality, “It’s the law of the jungle, it’s the rule of Don. And I hope it’s dawning on the world what we’re up against. I mean, this is serious. This guy is — he’s not mad. He is very intentional. But he’s unmoored. And he’s unhinged.”

Asked what Trump’s goal is, Newsom replied, “The goal is whatever he wants it to be. The goal is the world in his image. He’s a narcissist.”

Newsom then chastised European leaders, asking why they don’t do “what they’re saying in private?”

“Why don’t they just simply do what they know is right? Everybody’s talking behind his back. They laughing, and meanwhile they’re sucking up to him. It’s embarrassing.”

“This is not diplomacy,” the governor charged. “This is stupidity.”

Danish fund exits US Treasuries amid Trump’s Greenland threats

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., January 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Thomas Kika

January 20, 2026 

ALTERNET

As Donald Trump's threats about annexing Greenland continue to escalate, a Danish pension on Tuesday announced its exit from the US, saying that the president's policies have made investments in the country "not sustainable" in the long term.

Bloomberg spoke with AkademerPension about the decision to abandon US Treasuries for a report published Tuesday. The fund, worth around $25 billion USD, manages savings for teachers and academics in Denmark. By the end of 2025, the fund had roughly $100 million invested in US Treasuries, which it will withdraw by the end of the month in favor of similar alternatives.

“The US is basically not a good credit and long-term the US government finances are not sustainable,” Anders Schelde, chief investment officer at AkademikerPension, told the outlet.

Schelde claimed that "risk and liquidity management" were the only factors motivating the fund to remain invested in US assets, but given the mounting issues in the country, "we decided that we can find alternative to that." He added that Trump's continued rhetoric surrounding Greenland did factor into the decision to a degree, but the concerns about "concerns about fiscal discipline and a weaker dollar" under Trump's leadership were the primary motivator.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark situated mostly in the Arctic Circle. Trump has insisted since his first term that the US must gain control of Greenland, which Danish leaders have consistently dismissed, calling the idea a threat to their nation's sovereignty.

Trump's reasoning for wanting control of the island has been vague and inconsistent. At one point, access to Greenland's supplies of key minerals and oil was cited, though critics have pointed out that the cost and effort required to extract these would be more trouble than they are worth. More recently, Trump has claimed that the US "must" control Greenland for "national security" reasons, though he has not been specific about why, and critics have also pointed out that the US already operates military bases on the island and has access to the waters around it for defense purposes.

Susan B. Glasser is a New Yorker staff writer who has conducted extensive interviews with Trump for one of her books, recently claimed that Trump's obsession with controlling Greenland might stem from how large the territory appears on maps. Due to a phenomenon linked to the Mercator projection, land masses far from the Equator, like Greenland, can tend to appear larger than they actually are on certain maps.

“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’" Trump explained, according to Glasser. "You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”

Stunning chart shows Trump’s 'saber-rattling' already 'cost US one Greenland': economist

A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Sarah K. Burris

January 20, 2026

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump's push to take over Greenland has cost the United States $750 billion so far.

In a social media post, economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan Justin Wolfers captured the one chart that shows how disastrous Trump's "saber-rattling" has been for the United States, beyond its impact on the country's allies.

Wolfers showed a screen capture of the S&P, which opened down -1.3 percent.

"That's $750 billion of wealth destroyed -- roughly equal to estimates of the value of Greenland," said Wolfers. "And so in dollar terms his shenanigans have already cost the US one Greenland, and we've got nothing to show for it."

U.S. markets were closed on Monday due to the holiday celebrating Dr. Marin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. wasn't the only one to suffer. If the dollar continues to weaken against other global currencies, inflation will increase, one investment firm explained.

The Guardian reported, "In Europe, France’s Cac 40 share index dropped 1.1 percent, Germany’s Dax fell 1.5 percent and Italy’s FTSE MIB was off 1.5 percent."

Perhaps worse, the American dollar has fallen by 1 percent.

Things got worse overnight as Trump threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on French wine and champagne after France’s Emmanuel Macron indicated he wasn't willing to join Trump's so-called "board of peace" on Gaza.

In the U.S. the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 750 points after it opened. The biggest losers were the AI company Nvidia and Tesla.

The Nasdaq composite was down 1.8 percent at the open.

Trump has vowed there's "no going back" after his demands to Denmark for Greenland.