Fair enough. And I wasn't complaining about the topic in the first place. That wasn't what I couldn't understand. What I was decrying was the way it devolved into "he was white", "no, he was black", "no, he was white and so Denzel Washington can't play him".

I'm sure what I said was offensive to some, but I really didn't mean it that way. I was trying, in my bull-in-a-chinashop way, to point out to everyone that the terms 'white' and 'black' are completely and utterly meaningless in any context but popular culture within the United States. I'm surprised they still even put "African-american, Caucasian" and so forth on racial quota questionaires on stuff.

I didn't think the Phoenicians were Semitic, but I'm perfectly willilng to accept that I could be wrong on that one. My reasoning behind that was 1) I thought the were descended from the same group of people as the Sumerians, who definitely weren't Semitic and 2) I thought the reason the Jews wouldn't accept them, in the old Testament times, was because they weren't Semitic. Again, I could be way off base on all of that.