Mohammad Bakri

Mohammad Bakri (born 1953; Arabic: محمد بكري‎, Hebrew: מוחמד בכרי‎) is an Israeli Arab actor and film director of Palestinian descent.

Biography

Muhammad Bakri was born in the village of Bi'ina in northern Israel. He went to elementary school in his hometown and received his secondary education in the nearby city of Akko. He studied acting and Arabic literature at Tel Aviv University in 1973 and graduated three years later.

Bakri is married to Leila and has six children. His son Saleh Bakri is also an actor.

Acting and film career

Bakri began his professional acting career in with Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv, Haifa theater and al-Kasaba theater in Ramallah. His one-man plays, "The Pessoptimist," 1986, "The Anchor," 1991, "Season of Migration to the North 1993," and "Abu Marmar," 1999, were performed in Hebrew and Arabic.

After a few years of acting in Palestinian and Israeli film, Bakri began to act in international films in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada. Bakri also directed two documentary films including the controversial "Jenin, Jenin".

Bakri

Bakri may refer to:

Persons

Muhammad

Muḥammad (Arabic: محمد‎; c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE), is the central figure of Islam and widely regarded as its founder. He is known to Muslims as the "Holy Prophet", almost all of whom consider him to be the last prophet sent by God to mankind to restore Islam, which they believe to be the unaltered original monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. He united Arabia into a single Muslim polity and ensured that his teachings, practices, and the Quran, which Muslims believe was revealed to him by God, formed the basis of Islamic religious belief.

Born approximately in 570 CE in the Arabian city of Mecca, Muhammad was orphaned at an early age; he was raised under the care of his paternal uncle Abu Talib. After his childhood Muhammad primarily worked as a merchant. Occasionally, he would retreat to a cave named Hira in the mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer; later, at age 40, he reported being visited by Gabriel in the cave and received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that "God is One", that complete "surrender" (lit. islām) to him is the only way (dīn) acceptable to God, and that he was a prophet and messenger of God, similar to the other prophets in Islam.

Alain Gresh

Alain Gresh (born 1948 in Cairo, Egypt) is a French journalist and former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Biography

Alain Gresh was raised in Cairo. His biological father is Henri Curiel, a communist who was later assassinated in Paris. Gresh moved to Paris in his teens to study Mathematics and Arabic, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the PLO. He has written extensively on Islam and the Arab world.

He was editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, retired at end of 2015.

According to journalist Robert Fisk, Gresh is "the best commentator on the Middle East [...], whose work in Le Monde diplomatique is – or should be – essential reading for all politicians, generals, 'intelligence officers', torturers, and every Arab in the entire region."

Selected articles

Books

In English:

Jenin, Jenin

Jenin, Jenin is a film directed by Mohammed Bakri, a prominent Arab actor and Israeli citizen, in order to portray what Bakri calls "the Palestinian truth" about the "Battle of Jenin", a clash between the Israeli army and Palestinians in April 2002 which drew Palestinian accounts of the "Battle of Jenin" (Arabic: مجزرة جنين‎).

Background

A month after 18 Israelis had been killed in two separate attacks, and a few days after a suicide bombing in Netanya killed 30 and injured 140, the Israeli Defense Forces called up 30,000 reserve soldiers and launched Operation Defensive Shield.

During Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. The Israeli military refused to allow journalists and human rights organizations into the camp for "safety reasons" during the fighting, leading to a rapid cycle of rumors that a massacre had occurred. Jenin remained sealed for days after the invasion. Stories of civilians being buried alive in their homes as they were demolished, and of smoldering buildings covering crushed bodies, spread throughout the Arab world. Various casualty figures circulated, a senior Palestinian official accused Israel of massacring more than 500 people in the camp. UN fact-finding mission was not allowed by Israeli to enter Jenin.