Silenced in Beirut: American Businessman Amer Fakhoury's Six-Month Ordeal as a Hostage in Lebanon is a heartrending, harrowing, yet illuminating memoir by four devoted daughters recounting the false arrest, cruel confinement, and induced cancer inflicted on their father by the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government from September 2019 to March 2020.
It is the first complete telling of the headline-making story of Amer Fakhoury, a successful American businessman, who was lured to his native Lebanon by purposely deceptive assurances that the country would again welcome members of the prosperous Christian middle class who fled for their lives as a vengeance-filled Hezbollah terrorist militia took over Lebanon in 2000.
In this novelistic memoir written in the third person, Guila, Mandy, Macy, and Zoya Fakhoury describe the illegal detention and physical and medical torture of their father; the show trial by a corrupt court system determined to find him guilty; the aggressive bipartisan intervention of US officials, from President Donald Trump to Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) to obtain his release; and the conditions that caused an exceptionally fit man to succumb in a matter of months to fourth-stage cancer.
Through flashbacks, they intersperse earlier instances in their father's life that shed light on the ordeal he endured amid the hostage crisis.
Along the way, readers learn about the politics of Lebanon and gain a firsthand lesson in how beautiful places are in particular danger of being overrun by the worst people-and how this once-prosperous land is today on the verge of starvation and economic collapse and is likely to again be cursed with front-page news headlines.
Written in an easy-to-read and concise style, the book resurfaces the forgotten and grossly misunderstood history of Lebanon's noblest fighters, the South Lebanese Army, for whom Amer Fakhoury risked his life and because of whom the leadership in Beirut thought he should die.
Told by four young women whose childhood home was routinely invaded by Hezbollah yet who went on to become successful scientists and engineers, Silenced in Beirut combines the political and the personal-the intrigue of a political kidnapping amid the love and light of family and faith.
