Jordan’s King Abdullah has vowed to go all Clint Eastwood on the Islamic State.
Abdullah met with lawmakers on the Hill yesterday, after ISIS released its gruesome video of the fiery murder of air force 1st Lt. Muath al-Kasaesbeh. The king was in town for a week; yesterday morning the U.S. and U.S.-Jordan signed a bilateral assistance Memorandum of Understanding at the Four Seasons hotel.
The White House added a last-minute meeting to President Obama’s schedule yesterday, inviting the king to the Oval Office for a 20-minute conversation. Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden were in the room as well.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who was in the House Armed Services Committee meeting with the king, told Byron York that Abdullah vowed “retribution like ISIS hasn’t seen”:
“He mentioned ‘Unforgiven’ and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie.”
Hunter would not say which part of “Unforgiven” the king quoted, but noted it was where Eastwood’s character describes how he is going to deliver his retribution. There is a scene in the picture in which Eastwood’s character, William Munny, says, “Any man I see out there, I’m gonna kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down.”
“He’s angry,” Hunter said of King Abdullah. “They’re starting more sorties tomorrow than they’ve ever had. They’re starting tomorrow. And he said, ‘The only problem we’re going to have is running out of fuel and bullets.'”
“He’s ready to get it on,” Hunter added. “He really is. It reminded me of how we were after 9/11. We were ready to give it to them.”
Hunter said there was no mention of President Obama during the bipartisan meeting, either by King Abdullah or by any of the lawmakers in the room.
Hunter confirmed on Fox that the monarch’s focus is “retribution.”
“ISIS is now going to regret this, I think, more than anything else, because King Abdullah is not Barack Obama,” the congressman said. “…And hopefully, they will lead from the front and they will crush ISIS. That’s what’s happened here. That is what the king said that they are going to do. They are going to go in and crush ISIS to the best of their abilities.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said the king wasn’t asking anything of Congress in his Hill meetings.
“He was, as always, talking about what we need to do in the region. He is a great friend of the United States. He has been someone who has tried to bring the Arab community together against this,” Corker told Fox. “Obviously what he showed was tremendous resolve and there were questions about unity inside the country.”
Obama’s response was, shall we say, more mellow than Abdullah’s.
In the early hours this morning, Jordan hanged two terrorists, including Sajida al-Rishawi. Jordan had been weighing a deal for the release of the Iraqi awaiting the death penalty for her role in the grisly 2005 bombing of a wedding reception at the Radisson in Amman. But the kingdom demanded proof-of-life of the pilot, which ISIS didn’t provide.
Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad Momani vowed that “Jordanians’ wrath will devastate Daesh’s ranks.”
“As JAF mourns the brave pilot, it asserts that his spilled blood will be avenged and the punishment that will be inflicted on the tyrants of Earth who assassinated Muath will be proportionate to the magnitude of the tragedy of all Jordanians,” the Jordanian military said in a statement. “And soon will the unjust assailants know what vicissitudes their affairs will take.”
The movie reference is no surprise from the England- and U.S.-educated King Abdullah. The confessed Trekkie got an uncredited walk-on in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager, but didn’t speak in the cameo because he doesn’t have a Screen Actors Guild card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmut6FJ1d4M
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