One Family's Response to Terrorism

On January 18, 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University in Beirut and a respected scholar of Middle East politics, was shot in the back of the head as he stepped out of an elevator on his way to work. At the time, the chaos of Lebanon s civil war made it was impossible to investigate who had carried out the killing and why. Seventeen years later, armed with the knowledge of who had been responsible for the assassination and supported by the Anti-Terrorism Act passed by Congress in 1996, his family came to a painful consensus that nonviolent justice through the rule of law was a duty they could not ignore. As the author explores U.S. government intelligence, U.S. district court records, Malcolm Kerr s unpublished papers, and the recollections of journalists, diplomats, academics, and former Hizbullah hostages who lived through the violence in Lebanon in the 1980s, disturbing revelations emerge. The family s team of lawyers builds a clear case against the Islamic Republic of Iran for ordering Kerr s death.

One Family s Response to Terrorism: A Daughter s Memoir is a stunning portrait of the intimate way in which violence pulls lives apart and a moving account of an American family caught on the stage of Middle East politics and struggling with the moral choices required in seeking justice."