With all the uprisings across the Middle East I have people ask me about Jordan…….it seems that things are pretty quiet there…..no as much as you would think……there have been many small protests and the King has handled it like any king would….put them down as quickly as possible and under the radar of the media…….

Jordan is located in the middle of crisis…..on one side is Israel…on another is Syria on another is Iraq and then there is the continuous hot spot…Lebanon…..Jordan is simmering……

A good analysis has been written by Medhi Hasan………

The truth is that Jordan’s royal rulers have tended to use the country’s politicians and bureaucrats to deflect attention from their own failings; the four Hashemite kings have changed prime ministers almost 70 times since the establishment of modern Jordan in 1921 and the current king, Abdullah, has appointed 10 different prime ministers since coming to power in 1999 – three of them in the past 12 months alone. As I asked Mohammed Halaikah, a former deputy prime minister under Abdullah: Is there something wrong with every single Jordanian premier or perhaps something wrong with the king himself?

I was surprised, in fact, to find criticism of King Abdullah, and his wife, the glamorous Queen Rania, commonplace in Amman, the country’s capital – despite the fact that insulting the king is punishable by three years in prison. Abdullah, however, lacks the charisma and charm of his late father, Hussein; many Jordanians may continue to harbour a nationalist and Islamic attachment to their Hashemite ruling family but plenty of others, for example, openly mock the Western-educated monarch’s poor command of Arabic. Rania, who is of Palestinian descent, is particularly unpopular with the East Bankers and her lavish lifestyle and extravagant spending has prompted ominous comparisons with Marie Antoinette.

Lest we forget, however, tiny, impoverished Jordan is a key strategic ally of the US and one of only two Arab nations (the other being Egypt) to have signed a peace treaty with the state of Israel. If the Arab Spring were to spread to the Hashemite kingdom and the ruling family fell, after almost a century in power, it would have a massive, almost unquantifiable impact on the wider region and on the Muslim world as a whole.

I think that the small kingdom will erupt after the Syrian crisis is resolved……activists are waiting….waiting for the chance to make a case to the world media….that is not saying that small pockets of resistance will not appear , just a massive push is out of the question…..for now.