Jordan - عمّان Airwaves

Man, that Portugal station was awful. Sorry about that. We suppose it was gonna be tough to top Bangladesh anyway. 

OK, let's continue our journey around the world! It's been a while since we were in the Middle East. You guys wanna go to Jordan? Good, let's go to Jordan.

Remember that awesome facade in the cliff face in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that you were all "WOAH. Where is THAT?!!!" Well, we'll tell you. It's in Jordan! It's a 6th century city called Petra. Cool, huh? Tourism contributes a big chunk towards Jordan's GDP. Not specifically for Indiana Jones, just in general, you know?

After WWI, Transjordan was carved out of the Ottoman empire and kinda tooled around under British rule until after WWII. Apparently the Brits made a request to the UN to release Jordan from their control, which is kinda weird and totally out of step with the colony hungry Britain we know. Was it because they were totally broke from the war and wanted to shed some financial obligations? Was there an independence movement? Who knows?

There was a justifiably super-complicated turf-war going on here with Israel and Palestine, but it seems that Transjordan shacked up with a chunk of Palestine and became Jordan shortly after the creation of Israel and the ensuing regional war. Sorry for being sloppy, but was and is a pretty sticky situation and outlining the complexities is just not reasonable.

After decades of hostilities, Jordan and Israel finally made peace in the mid-90's, making Jordan one of only two countries in the region to have full diplomatic ties with Israel (Egypt being the other.) In doing so, Jordan ended up getting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual US aid, a special economic zone that allows them to forgo US tariffs if they use Israeli supplies, and the king got his face on an Israeli postage stamp. Sounds like a pretty good deal to us.

So 51.5% of the population is male, which is pretty unusual. How is it skewed towards males? With a patriarchal culture, did females not reply to the census? Is it due to the large amount of foreign labor that tends to be men? These laborers are protected under Jordan's labor laws, the only Arab country to do so, and if you've heard some of the horror stories from the UAE or Saudi Arabia, you'd know how great that is.

Ummmm... Let's see. What else. Woah! The Queen is GORGEOUS, y'all!

drooooooooooooooool.

Oh! Looks like they actually have a very competitive transport and knowledge-based economy flourishing, too! Even more so than the UAE! It looks like a big part of this is political, as it seems like they don't have much beef with anyone in the region anymore, and a lot of other countries in the region are pissed at someone else. So, these countries, and nations from across the globe, do business with Jordan instead. They've got a TON of free trade agreements with a pretty diverse group of nations. And with Iraq and Palestine being perpetually unstable, it seems that a lot of the companies from those nations operate out of Jordan.

Looks like they've got little oil or water, which means they have to import energy and food and that necessity has a habit of driving a nation to make good with it's neighbors. You know who has control of tons of water in the Middle East? Turkey. With the coming food crisis, expect them to be strutting around. Saudi Arabia is already pretty much renting agricultural land in Africa. Israel knows how to conserve water, so expect them to be selling a lot of technology for it. Will they sell to Arab countries through Jordan? Might be a good idea...

Whew! There is so much to say about Jordan - we definitely can't do it justice here!

Let's see how good of an ambassador this radio station is! Transmitting from one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world - Amman (عمّان), Mazaj FM is a radio station of the future with presences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the web. Also, they play music. Enjoy! 

Mazaj FM

Click on the long text under the little blue radio icon on left hand side of the page. It looks like this in Arabic:

اضغط هنا للاستماع للبث المباشر

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