[forkinsocket]

If Arabic is your native language, you’re an Arab. The distiction between Arabs & Arabized are used by anthropologists & historians & almost all Sham Arabs refer to themselves as Arabs except for Maronites, Syriacs, & Assyrians. One exception is one Palestinian I met who did not wish to be called an Arab.

[Cronos]

Well, yes, by your definition of what a person calls themselves, you are correct. However, historically, genetically, these people originate from the peoples I indicated hence they have a lighter skin color. The force of Arabization we can see even now in Sudan as the article indicates where blacks are encouraged to think of themselves as Arabs (because Arabs are the Holy people and to make yourselves holy you need to be like them and even better be like Mo and grow your beard long -- as the Taliban forced young men in Afghanistan to do).

You're right about the Christian Middle-Easterners preferring to call themselves by their own names instead of being assimilated ("Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated")

however, the other people from the ME who are Moos and don't call themselves Arabs are the Berbers from north Africa -- many are now throughing that yoke off.

Ditto for Iran: I'm waiting for the native Iranis to realise the inherent dichtomy of being inheritors of a proud civilisation and living under a Bedo's religion.