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me? We met in Damascus last week.” (laughs)

So he gets up, very friendly, you know, and he says, “Oh, yes, of course.” I sit down and then I said, “Why don't you let them go?” (laughs) Then I proceeded to tell him about my incident in the Damascus synagogue. He's writing it all down. I said, “You know, when we were together, you told me that you wanted American Jews to come. You said, ‘Senator Javits should come and other American Jews should come and see that we're not torturing the Jewish community.’” And I said, “I went, and I'm not suggesting that you're torturing them, but I must say to you, I felt intimidated, and supposing I was a simple citizen, not a Congressman, not accompanied by a member of the Foreign Ministry. How would you like to walk into a synagogue and suddenly be confronted with three militant Arabs who are not Jewish?” He's writing it down. He said, “I'm writing it down. I will see that it doesn't happen again.” Very lethal. I worried about those three Arab militants. Okay.

So then he said, “But I must tell you that we are very desirous of encouraging Americans to come. We had an economic fair last year, and there were some bombings of the American exhibits, and not very long ago -- several weeks ago -- we executed the five people who were found to have engaged in those bombings. So we are very tough on that.” And then he said, “Supposing one of them had been Jewish? What would you have said?” I said, “Good point.” Okay. I said, “Let's keep