A good documentary on health care: “Money-Driven Medicine”

I just watched Money-Driven Medicine this evening.  It’s a documentary about our profit-driven health care system that shows how money-making infuses and corrupts our system.  My fiancee, who works as a nurse at both a hospital and a doctor’s office, says that the film portrayed the system very fairly.  Here are a couple of things that stood out to me:

• For the market enthusiasts: Repeating “we have the best health care system in the world” is not enough.  Idealizing free-market competition in the health care system doesn’t make sense to me.  One central point of the documentary is that the health care industry is based on paying for services.  This incentivizes all sorts of unnecessary tests and often turns doctors into dispensers of procedures rather than counselors who can help you improve your health and live a healthy lifestyle.  The most extreme example in the film was that Dr. Donald Berwick, who researches the health care system, called a hospital in Texas that advertised a great procedure.  He asked for information about it to share with other hospitals, but the hospital refused to share it because sole possession of the procedure gave them a competitive edge in their market.
• For those who want to increase the role of government: It appears that the documentary was based on Maggie Mahar’s book of the same name.  Mahar said in the movie that you can trace the rise of medicine as an industry to the creation of Medicare in 1965.  This meant that medicine was big business, and businesses that built lots and lots of hospitals with lots and lots of technology and placed businessmen in charge of health care companies became the norm.  So that’s a serious challenge to the Democrats’ plans for more government involvement and money in the system.  Wouldn’t that suggest that companies will line up to get lots of money from the government as the government spends more?  It seems like the Obama plan will entrench the medical industry that much more, as some critics are saying.

I’d encourage you to watch the movie if you’re interested in this topic.  For now, it looks like it’s only free until the end of November, but maybe they’ll extend the free period.

Finally, an interesting way to look at the economy from Doug Wilson.  It’s an old post that I was reminded of when thinking about this:

We still have more capitalist traces and remnants than (say) Europe, but ours is a managed and manipulated economy, not a free economy. This means, in the long run, we have a system where subsidized and regulated business and officious government put their heads together and decide the best way to screw the little guy. In response, the little guy howls and, not having read basic economics, calls for the government to “do something.” The government is happy to pretend to do so because this bestows more power on them, and the government will then have more resources to work with the next group of lobbyists for this interest or that one. Free market?

Secular and religious Zionism

In Zionism, David Engel writes that “after 1948 many diaspora Zionists expressed their Zionism primarily by employing the Hebrew of contemporary Israel as a second language and by constructing their cultural environment around the literature, music, art, thought and scholarship of Jews in the Jewish state, in order to participate as completely as possible in the ongoing development of Jewish civilization” (146).  Engel writes that this commitment came from the Zionist tradition of thinking of the Jews as a “nation” in the modern sense, influenced by the European nationalist thought of the late 19^th century.  This was quite different from the traditional Jewish sense of a people in covenant with God, bound by His law.  In traditional Jewish life, rabbis had acted as the interpreters of God’s law.

Engel continues, referring to Peter Smolenskin, possibly the first advocate of large-scale Jewish migration to Palestine in the late 1800s:

In contrast, thinking about Jews as a modern nation suggested an altogether different locus of sovereignty – the Jewish people itself.  Smolenskin placed sovereignty with the Jewish nation as a whole in an 1875 essay exploring how Jewish law might adapt itself to circumstances in which one or another legal prohibition “becomes a burden upon the people, keeping them from pursuing their livelihood and their interests”….  Rabbis, he argued, could not be counted upon to help lighten the burden, because they “have nothing in common with those who work for a living, so they can neither know nor understand the distress that the multiplicity of law causes”.  Therefore, he reasoned, in such circumstances “the people” themselves could rightfully ignore or modify aspects of the divine law on their own authority.  Defining Jews as a “nation” quickly became a way to justify this position; if “nations” possessed the inalienable right to establish their own states – an increasingly common assertion in Smolenskin’s day – then the authority to make laws must reside in the general will of a nation’s own members. (147)

This definition of Jewishness as constantly evolving was accepted by many Zionist thinkers in the 20th century “especially because it provided them with a basis for claiming leadership of the Jewish people in the absence of rabbinic sanction” (148).  This meant that once Israel was established, there were questions about the relationship of Zionism and the new Jewish state.  Engel writes that Israel’s leaders wanted all Jews to come to Israel, while Jews outside of Israel wanted to have a say in Jewish policies.

My previous post on Zionism focused on the influences that the secular ideologies of socialism and nationalism had on Zionism, as has this one so far.  If Engel is right, as I think he is, then secular ideas played a major role in the foundation of the Zionist movement.  Many of the movement’s leaders, including the first prime minister of Israel, hoped that Israel’s establishment would lead to “normalization,” diminishing anti-Semitism as Jews rose to a normal status of nationhood along with other nations.

But, Engel writes, Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbors in the 1967 (Six-Day) War added a new dimension to Jewish attachment to Israel.  Now that Israel controlled the Western Wall of the Temple and other holy sites, a profoundly religious attachment to the land of Israel emerged among a greater number of Jews, and religious Jews who wanted to settle the new territories for religious reasons and in some cases prepare the way for the Messiah began to have more influence.  The religious Zionists often supported the secular, more hawkish Likud party, as both supported the idea of a larger Israel that did not need to worry about “normalizing” relationships with the outside world.

Lastly, one interesting trend that Engel highlighted was that while some in Likud have backed away from their agreement with religious Zionism (think of Ariel Sharon’s program of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and I believe that he was considering a similar action in the West Bank before his stroke), American Zionist organizations have remained committed to the Israeli possession of religious sites.  Engel refers to American Zionists who argued during peace talks in 2000 that Israel ought to take into account the religious needs of Jews worldwide before making deals that would affect the possession of these sites.  This has sparked some reaction in Israeli secular elite circles that perhaps Israel ought to simply worry about its own Jewish and non-Jewish citizens and not feel any responsibility toward Jews in the worldwide diaspora.  This position is called “post-Zionism” (185), and reflects the tension that I discussed above: what is the relationship between the state of Israel and the Zionist movement?

Ministering to returning soldiers

Yesterday I listened to a podcast of a great episode of Speaking of Faith, originally from 2006.  Krista Tippett interviewed Chaplain Major John Morris about his role in ministering to soldiers during and after war (listen to the program or read the transcript here).  He started out with a very evocative description of Easter 2004 in Fallujah:

Maj. Morris: I was at a camp with the Marines, the 1st Marine Division. I was supporting Army special operations soldiers, psychological operations soldiers, who were supporting the 1st Marine Division as they began to lay siege to and take down that city. At Camp Blue Diamond, it’s the headquarters of the 1st Marine Division, and we had an early sunrise service, which actually was dangerous because the camp was being mortared occasionally. But, nonetheless, the Marines showed up in great strength, with a few Army personnel there.

And I celebrated with Father Devine, the 1st Marine Division Roman Catholic priest. And it was particularly memorable because, you know, it was the only service I’ve ever conducted where we were — we all knew that, by the end of the day, people who were worshipping in that service would no longer be on this planet. And so we talked about the hope of the Resurrection with a sense of fervency and urgency that I had never experienced before.

The walls of the chapel were adorned with posters with the name of every Marine that had been wounded in the Anbar province, and every Marine that had been killed. And I couldn’t help but think of that verse in Hebrew[s], as it talked about being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. You know, we were, and we knew that very quickly many of us could be on that wall.

So there was a sense of joy, and expectancy, and dread all meld [sic] together. All the Marines had their weapons. They were ready to go out on their mission. The place was packed. It was loud, as Marines can be. It was a participatory service. It was a beautiful, sacred privilege. And the service ended. And I went on my way to do my rounds of conducting Easter services for Marines and Army personnel all over that area. So it was an amazing time. A lot of Marines were killed, a lot of Army soldiers killed.

Morris gave a perspective on soldiers’ lives from a close perspective, which is welcome amid the rampant politicization of our wars by politicians and political media.  To me, it’s become clear that our political discourse has very little space for soldiers’ actual experiences.  The soldiers must be righteous executors of a righteous foreign policy (for supporters of the wars), victims (for mainstream opponents of the wars), or criminals (for far left opponents of the wars).  It’s sad that very few seem to be really interested in understanding what soldiers go through, but instead seem more interested in using the soldiers as political props.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room in any of those characterizations for a real human experience in war.

Robert Louis Wilken lecture on the Church Fathers and Scripture

Wheaton College, just a bit over an hour from my home, has inaugurated the new Center for Early Christian Studies.  On October 29, Robert Louis Wilken of the University of Virginia gave the inaugural lecture, “Going Deeper into the Bible:  The Church Fathers as Interpreters.”  Although I wasn’t able to go, I listened to the lecture last week.  You can do the same by clicking on the above link for the CECS.

Wilken tried to show how the Church Fathers interpreted Scripture.  David Neff, Editor-in-Chief of the Christianity Today Media Group, attended the lecture and gave a summary of Wilken’s argument and the example that he used about the interpretation of Isaiah 6:

Evangelicals have long taught that the meaning of Scripture is open to every Spirit-led reader, and that biblical interpretation must not be held hostage by church tradition. Isn’t the Bible intelligible without the Fathers?Yes, of course, in a sense it is. But the Fathers help us go more deeply into the Bible, Wilken said. They teach us to read it more slowly and enter it more deeply. He illustrated this by looking at several passages through their eyes, showing the way in which they treated the Bible as a single, coherent book in which difficult passages are illuminated by other passages. Indeed, those other texts raise the questions that lead us deeper.

Thus Isaiah‘s report in chapter 6 that the prophet “saw God” is clearly in tension with passages (such as John 1:18) that suggest no human has seen, or even can see, God. The key, however, is found in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” By mining the notions in that passage, the Fathers were able, not only to explain in what sense some might “see God,” but also to point the way toward the ideal Christian life. Thus to see God is to be united to him through purity of life. Understand, said Wilken, that the Bible is not primarily about the head; it is about the heart.

Christ and discontinuity

Peter Leithart reflects on the Sanhedrin’s horror at Jesus’ statement that he would destroy and then rebuild the temple.  While he was referring to his body, they took it as an offense against the center of their religious life.  Rather than wanting a God who claims this power,

They want a god of guarantees, whose entire reason for being is to ensure that their temple will stand and keep standing, no matter what.   Like all pagans, they want a god who ensures the persistence of the past, not a God who breaks down to make a new future.  For them, a God who destroys and raises up is a blasphemous God.

That’s what Sanhedrins of every age long for: A god who sanctions their tradition.   They will always send a God who kicks over their little monuments to the cross.

A caution for Christians in every era.

John Piper: Rejoice over the reach of world Christianity, but don’t be complacent

From his recent sermon, The Legacy of Antioch:

Meet the Global South

Let’s review the situation of the world today in regard to the spread of Christianity, and what this new term Global South means. The Global South refers to the astonishing growth of the Christian church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia while the formerly dominant centers of Christian influence in Europe and America are weakening. For example:

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 71 percent of professing Christians in the world lived in Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, that number had shrunk to 28 percent. 43 percent of the Christians now lived in Latin America and Africa.¹
• In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians, which was about 10 percent of the population. By 2000, the number of Christians was 360 million, about half the population of the continent. This is probably the largest shift in religious affiliation that has ever occurred, anywhere.²
• There are 17 million baptized members of the Anglican church in Nigeria, compared with 2.8 million in the United States.³
• “This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined.”
• “The number of practicing Christians in China is approaching the number in the United States.”⁴
• “Last Sunday . . . more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”
• Kenya has more people in Christian churches on Sunday than Canada.
• “More believers worship together in Nagaland than in Norway.”
• “More Christian workers from Brazil are active in cross cultural ministry outside their homelands than from Britain or from Canada.” In other words, the churches of the Global South are increasingly sending churches.
• Last Sunday “more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland.”⁵
• “This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.”⁶

“In a word,” Mark Noll says, “the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history.”⁷

The West Is Not Done in Sending Missionaries

This is a great cause for Christians to rejoice in the sovereign grace of God. But what it does not mean is that the day of sending missionaries from our churches in the West is over. That would be a tragic misunderstanding of the situation. Partnership in mission with the Global South does not mean that all the unreached peoples of the world can be reached by people who are in the Global South. Don’t buy into the idea that we should send our money, not our people. That would sound very much like: “Let them shed their blood, not ours; we’ll just send money.”

The point of the sermon was this: “The Legacy of Antioch is that it was a mission church that became a sending church through the partnership of Barnabas and Saul, who in the end were sent out by the church to which they were sent.”  Piper also highlights the need for Christian instruction after conversion:

In all your evangelism and church planting, don’t neglect to teach the converts and to take them deep into the gospel and build them up so they are stable and strong….

In other words, he would do what Barnabas and Saul did. They saw a great ingathering, and they taught and taught and taught. They strengthened the believers. They sank the roots of the people down deep. They brought stability. They built a foundation for missions.

All over the world (you read this in all the literature), the cry is for trained, strong, Bible-saturated leaders. What will your part be in raising them up?

Justin Martyr before the prefect of Rome

Through reading Litfin’s Getting to Know the Church Fathers, I found out that the short narrative of Justin’s martyrdom is online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, maintained by Calvin College.  Justin and others were arrested in Rome about AD 165.  The prefect (chief magistrate) of Rome first ordered Justin to sacrifice to the gods and then examined him about his beliefs and the meetings of Christians that followed him (see Chapter I and Chapter II).  The prefect, Rusticus, then asked the others if they were Christians and asked Liberianus if he would worship the gods.  Their responses, recorded in Chapter III give a brief glimpse into what seems to have been a diverse group of Christians in Rome.  Two had been taught the faith by their parents, while another claimed that “Christ is our true father, and faith in Him is our mother; and my earthly parents died.”  This latter man, Hierax, had originally come from “Iconium in Phrygia” and came to Rome after he was driven out, while Euelpistus’ parents were in Cappadocia.  Euelpistus, “a servant of Caesar,” gave my favorite response to the prefect: “I too am a Christian, having been freed by Christ; and by the grace of Christ I partake of the same hope.”  In the face of their commitment, the prefect informed the Christians of the fate that they faced.  I have quoted in full the last two chapters (IV and V) of the story:

The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?” Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall have His gifts.²⁶⁴⁶ [alternate reading: “I shall have what He teaches [us to expect].”] // For I know that, to all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense?” Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods.” Justin said, “No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished.” Justin said, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished,²⁶⁴⁷ [alternate reading: “It was our chief wish to endure tortures for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.”] // because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.” Thus also said the other martyrs: “Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols.”

Rusticus the prefect pronounced sentence, saying, “Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged,²⁶⁴⁸ and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws.” The holy martyrs having glorified God, and having gone forth to the accustomed place, were beheaded, and perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour. And some of the faithful having secretly removed their bodies, laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ having wrought along with them, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

According to G.W. Bowersock’s Martyrdom and Rome, narratives of martyrdom were a major form of early Christian literature “that was exciting to read as it was edifying” (24).  This narrative clearly points to the respect accorded to martyrs, portraying Justin and his companions as having “perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour.”

Note: When quoting from the source, I left the footnote links in.  Go to the CCEL source to read them in full, if you’d like to.  For two of them, I tried to summarize the note in brackets.

The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?” Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall have His gifts.^26462646 Another reading is δόγματα, which may be translated, “I shall have what He teaches [us to expect].” // For I know that, to all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense?” Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods.” Justin said, “No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished.” Justin said, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished,^26472647 This passage admits of another rendering. Lord Hailes, following the common Latin version, thus translates: “It was our chief wish to endure tortures for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.” // because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.” Thus also said the other martyrs: “Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols.”

“Emerging adults” and liberal theology

Peter Leithart comments on the end of Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition.  Here is his full post:

Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal its “wider cultural triumph. . . . Liberal Protestant have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”  Smith adds, “liberal Protestantism’s core values – individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience – have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving.”  Try, Smith implies, running an organization centered on the values of “emancipation” and “the authority of experience.”

Smith’s own surveys of 18-24-year-old “emerging adults” supports Demerath’s claims.  His team found that “individual autonomy, unbounded tolerance, freedom from authorities, the affirmation of pluralism, the centrality of human self-consciousness, the practical value of moral religion, epistemological skepticism, and an instinctive aversion to anything ‘dogmatic’ or committed to particulars were routinely taken for granted by respondents.”  They found that “most Catholic and Jewish emerging adults . . . talked very much like classical liberal Protestants” and “evangelical Protestant and black Protestant emerging adults even talked like liberal Protestants.”

Richard Niebuhr’s 1937 description of liberalism is alive and well: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

If Demerath and Smith are right, liberal theology lost the battle for formal membership but won the “hearts and minds” of the American people, including many evangelicals.  I’ve always thought that this explanation of the decline of the liberal mainline denominations made sense: why go to church if the church keeps telling you that it doesn’t offer to show you something that’s certain?

The pointlessness of the Arab-Israeli peace process

Nathan Brown (guest-blogging for Marc Lynch) and Michael Totten both say that we should give up hope for the near future.  Brown, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, highlights the brokenness of the Palestinian Authority (which is says is “neither Palestinian nor an authority”), and says that the Obama approach (which he says is basically a modified Bush approach) needs to be completely scrapped:

There have been tactical mistakes aplenty, though to be fair to the current US leaders, their predecessors could be stunningly maladroit as well.  But the problem goes beyond clumsiness.  The commonalties between the late Bush approach and the early Obama approach far outnumber the differences: they amount to a “West Bank first” strategy of building up the Ramallah government, pursuing Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in support of a two-state solution, and ignoring Hamas on the assumption that allowing the impoverishment of Gaza will bring Palestinians there to their senses.

Seen this way, the Obama administration’s embarrassments of the past month have served a vital public service: they reveal that the basic US approach leads only to political decay.  In a short commentary for the Carnegie Endowment, I argue that this is the time to abandon rather than tweak failed policies.

Totten, taking a broader regional view, says that the coming Israeli-Syrian talks are simply a show for the West, noting that Bashar Assad stated that “Resistance forms the core of our policy” when announcing peace talks with Israel.

Totten also made the same case earlier this year about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (it appears to be written around the time of the Gaza War this past winter).  This piece, called “The Mother of All Quagmires,” contains the most memorable section of any of these three pieces:

All wars end, and this mother of all quagmires will eventually end like the others. But the Middle East will have to change before it is solvable. President Barack Obama no doubt will pull out all the stops to broker a peace agreement no matter how bleak the prospects may look. There is something to be said for struggling against long odds, and an excessively negative attitude can be self-defeating. Perhaps it’s even worth sponsoring a doomed peace process just to keep up appearances so the United States won’t be blamed when it continues to fail. But President Obama should take care to proceed as though failure – through no fault of his own – is the most likely outcome right now.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a cautionary note to Israelis in the New York Times that applies just as well to the Obama Administration. “There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation,” he wrote. “This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief. The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.”

Dan Schueftan made a similar point much more bluntly when I met him last week in Israel. “Ariel Sharon believed we could change the world by force,” he said. “Shimon Peres believed we could change it by being nice and stupid. They are both megalomaniacs.”

The last paragraph, and the American belief that we can solve this conflict if we just have the right solution, reminds me of Ron Rosenbaum’s critique of solutionism.

Totten and Brown both make a good case for lowering expectations.  I’d be interested to read critiques of their work too.

A new dynamic of power in the Middle East

Michael Slackman writes that U.S. allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia have seen their influence decline in the region as Syria and Iran have increased their power, even in the midst of political unrest in Iran and a Syrian “economic and water crisis.”  Syrian and Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah allows them to project power by influencing the internal affairs of Lebanon and the Palestinians.

Officials in Saudi Arabia and Egypt acknowledge all this; they admit that they are no longer masters of their universe. What they do not agree upon is how to respond.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has decided that Arab unity is the only way to re-establish the kingdom’s role and to blunt Iran’s growing influence. The king has begun a diplomatic drive to smooth relations with two Arab leaders who have insulted and admonished him in the past, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and, more recently, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Egyptian officials say they wish the king well but have declined to participate in his reconciliation initiative because they think it will fail as long as Syria determines that the advantages of playing the spoiler outweigh the gains of pushing for peace.

“If there is no peace, then all those who bet against peace are winning,” said an Egyptian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid increasing tensions with the United States or Saudi Arabia. “And all those who act and bet there will be peace are losing, like us. We are losing because we are putting this bet.”

The great promise of President Obama’s June speech in Cairo, officials and political commentators said, was severely damaged when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on her recent trip to the Middle East, praised as “unprecedented” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to slow the building of settlements. That left the leadership of Saudi Arabia and Egypt — the two regional American allies most committed to negotiating with Israel — exposed, embarrassed and weakened, political analysts and government officials said.

“Egypt’s role is receding regionally, and its cards are limited,” said Emad Gad, an expert in international relations at the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Their main card, which is reconciliation and peace, is receding.”