BBC Arabic

BBC Arabic may refer to the Arabic-language radio station run by the BBC World Service, as well as the BBC’s Arabic-language satellite TV channel, and the website that serves as an Arabic language news portal and provides online access to both the TV and radio broadcasts.

The radio service is broadcast from Broadcasting House in London as well as from a BBC Bureau in Cairo.

In 1936 the BBC helped the British Colonial Office set up the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem, a medium wave radio broadcast. This was created as a way to broadcast British views to the Arab world. This was partly in response to the Italian Arabic-language radio broadcasts that were transmitted by medium wave from Bari, and also in short wave from Rome, beginning in 1934. After the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, these broadcasts became strongly anti-British.

In the years leading up to the 1938 establishment of the BBC Arabic-language service, there were plans by the British Foreign Office to set up radio broadcasts based in Cyprus. Cyprus at the time was a Crown Colony in the British Empire, and seen as more stable than Palestine, a British Mandate. Also during this time, the BBC was insistent that its established news standards not be compromised in the name of broadcasting Arabic-language British propaganda.